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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3465, Sunday, March 8, 2009 Editor: Mark
KYE HO! Listen with joy!
The truth beyond mind cannot be grasped by any faculty of mind;
The meaning of non-action cannot be understood in compulsive
activity;
To realise the meaning of non-action and beyond mind,
Cut the mind at its root and rest in naked awareness.
- Tilopa, posted to DailyDharma
A Tendency to Shine
If you prefer smoke over fire
then get up now and leave.
For I do not intend to perfume
your mind's clothing
with more sooty knowledge.
No, I have something else in mind.
Today I hold a flame in my left hand
and a sword in my right.
There will be no damage control today.
For God is in a mood
to plunder your riches and
fling you nakedly
into such breathtaking poverty
that all that will be left of you
will be a tendency to shine.
So don't just sit around this flame
choking on your mind.
For this is no campfire song
to mindlessly mantra yourself to sleep with.
Jump now into the space
between thoughts
and exit this dream
before I burn the damn place down.
- Adyashanti, posted to The_Now2
You are the One Self, Awareness Itself. Stop for a moment right
now, and notice this presence of awareness that you are - here
and now. Notice that you are spacious, open, awake and free.
Notice that these words are arising in this spacious openness
that you are.
- Stephen Wingate
The sense of being a separate individual feels very real and
affects every part of that apparent experience. It is a state of
contracted energy which becomes embodied and which brings with it
a feeling of disquiet and longing. There can be a held sense of
feeling unworthy and of having lost something indescribable. It
is as though the "me" resides within the boundaries of
the body and sees everything outside as something else with which
it has to negotiate. Out of these experiences is generated a
compulsion to continuously seek comfort or release. This is the
dream of individuality which seems real until it doesn't.
The "me" searches for peace and fulfilment, the
"me" searches for self-improvement or purity, presence
or detachment. The "me" seeks clarity or any formula
which will give the "me" what it thinks it wants or
needs. But the "me" not getting what it wants is not
the dilemma. The dilemma is the apparent "me."
No amount of effort, process, clarity or belief can ever bring
anything ther than more "me" searching for that which
the "me" cannot have or know.
The suggestion that separation is only a thought or an
understanding that comes or goes in presence is an initially
attractive idea for the seeker who dreams of an easy answer which
isn't personally threatening and will bring permanent happiness.
Thoughts of separation are only individual stories about an
already embodied state of feeling restricted and apart. If
separation was only a thought or a belief, it could be seen
through or changed to its opposite, and then "BINGO"
there would be liberation . . . you would think!
Such idealistic communications often go hand in hand with a
relentless reiteration of the idea that separation is
"fine" because there is only ever oneness. This is like
telling a blind person that blindness is "fine" because
all there is is seeing. Of course there is only oneness. But what
apparently arises in oneness is a deep sense of separation which
doesn't feel "fine."
These conceptual notons speak only of symptoms and do not
recognise the source of the apparent dilemma that can fill every
part of feeling separate.
In essence what is sought is love. But it is the love that is
absolute, all-embracing and eternal. It is this overwhelming love
that many have glimpsed, and which I attempted to describe in The
Open Secret when I seemed to be walking across a park and then
was no more anyone. It wasn't experienced because there was
suddenly no experiencer. It was a glimpse that no-one glimpsed. I
then returned as "a someone" and tried again and again
to re-discover that unconditional love which I could not know.
It is that love which is alluded to in literature, music and art.
The most fascinating love stories are about unrequited love,
because they point to that absolute love which the individual
cannot possess. The powerful fascination of falling in love comes
out of a primal sense that in that love you could be lost. It is
that overwhelming love which is in all of our longing and s the
fullness in the emptiness, the everything in the nothing. It is
unconditional love which also appears as its opposite.
Wonderfully, it is also that very love which constantly sings to
us through our senses and in every part of the aliveness that is
happening.
Liberation is a word used to describe an apparent release from
the illusion of feeling imprisoned and apart from love, or
wholeness. That shift is essentially an energetic release out of
contraction into boundlessness.
Whenever and wherever there is a deep and uncompromising sharing
together of the very real paradox of being, a palpable resonance
can emerge. Out of that openness there can be a release of that
contraction into boundlessness and what arises is the wonder of
simply being.
- Tony Parsons
It is true that there is nothing to gain for the person. The
question, "who am I?," undermines the beliefs in the
mind that there is a person in the machine. Once that is done,
then who can get what? This discovery that no one is asking the
question is not something that you do, it is something that just
happens as a result of the questioning. Once the conceptual
"I" is dropped by the mind as a valid center, then the
door swings open to what is being pointed to, the emptiness that
is full. As long as a search is going on, then there is someone
searching. As long as there is someone searching the cycle
continues. Go for the root. Ask the question until the mind comes
up with an answer or folds under the weight of it.
- John Greven