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#3466 - Monday, March 9,
2009 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Many People, Many Paths, One Dharma
As skillful means we can employ whatever is
useful, whatever is truly helpful. For each of us at different
times, different traditions, philosophical constructs, and
methods may serve us, either because of temperament, background,
or capacities. For some, the language of emptiness may be as dry
as the desert, while for others it may reveal the heart-essence
of liberation. Some may quickly recognize the nature of awareness
itself, while others emphasize the letting go of those mind
states that obscure it. Some may find that the path of devotion
truly empties the self, but for others this way may simply act as
a cloud of self-delusion. We each need great honesty of
introspection and wise guidance from teachers to find our own
skillful path.
-Joseph Goldstein, from One Dharma (HarperOne)
Ground Your Life
Most of us study Buddhism as though it were
something that was already given to us. We think that what we
should do is preserve the Buddha’s teaching, like putting
food in the refrigerator. Then to study Buddhism we take the food
out of the refrigerator. Whenever you want it, it is already
there. Instead, Zen students should be interested in how to
produce food from the field, from the garden. We put the emphasis
on the ground.
- Shunryu Suzuki, from Not Always So (HarperCollins)
Let Go and Keep Your Balance
It is important to realize that to identify
oneself as a meditator or a spiritual person or even a Buddhist
can be another way to get caught or lose one’s true balance.
This is like carrying a raft on your head instead of using it for
a vehicle to the other shore. The purpose of meditation is not to
create a new spiritual identity, nor to become the most
meditative person on the block, who tells other people how they
should live. To practice is to let go.
Joseph Goldstein & Jack Kornfield, from Seeking the Heart
of Wisdom
Adyashanti and
Gangaji ... a quote potpourri Posted to The_Now2 by
Jan Roxburgh Misery needs your conspiracy; it needs
your help.
Without your resistance misery cannot survive.
~ Adyashanti
If you want to know something, go elsewhere.
If you want to un-know everything, then sit and listen.
~ Adyashanti
If spiritual practices serve the purpose of stopping the mind,
they are strong allies.
But if they deepen the belief that you are someone in particular
who practices something in particular
in order to get something that you do not believe is already
here,
then they are an obstruction.
They keep you spinning around yourself
rather than allowing you to deepen into yourself.
~ Gangaji
Recognize the power of mind, respect the power of mind.
And also recognize the power behind the power, the ocean holding
the wave.
Recognize yourself as the ocean, with your stories, your
feelings, as waves.
Waves can be beautiful or terrifying, but always they return to
the ocean.
Every wave always is made up of the ocean. No wave can ever be
separate from
the ocean. Waves of thoughts, waves of emotions, waves of
sensations, waves
of events, are all made up of consciousness. And all return to
consciousness,
while never being separate from consciousness.
And if this becomes another story, let this go,
and see what is true.
~ Gangaji
"Many spiritual seekers get "stuck" in emptiness,
in the absolute, in
transcendence. They cling to bliss, or peace, or
indifference.
When the self-centered motivation for living disappears, many
seekers become
indifferent. They see the perfection of all existence and find no
reason for
doing anything, including caring for themselves or others. I call
this "taking a false
refuge." It is a very subtle egoic trap; it's a fixation in
the absolute and all
unconscious form of attachment that masquerades as liberation.
It can be very difficult to wake someone up from this deceptive
fixation
because they literally have no motivation to let go of it. Stuck
in a form
of divine indifference, such people believe they have reached the
top of the
mountain when actually they are hiding out halfway up its slope.
Enlightenment does not mean one should disappear into the realm
of
transcendence. To be fixated in the absolute is simply the polar
opposite of
being fixated in the relative.
With the dawning of true enlightenment, there is a tremendous birthing of impersonal Love and wisdom that never fixates in any realm of experience.
To awaken to the absolute view is profound
and transformative, but to awaken
from all fixed points of view is the birth of true nonduality. If
emptiness
cannot dance, it is not true Emptiness. If moonlight does not
flood the
empty night sky and reflect in every drop of water, on every
blade of grass,
then you are only looking at your own empty dream. I say, Wake
up! Then,
your heart will be flooded with a Love that you cannot
contain."
~ Adyashanti
Has it ever occurred to you that you are seeking God with His
eyes?
--Adyashanti
You are here. However you imagine yourself to be, you are here.
Imagine yourself as a body, you are here. Imagine yourself as
God, you are
here.
Imagine yourself as worthless, superior, nothing at all, you are
still here.
My suggestion is that you stop all imagining, here.
~ Gangaji
Can you imagine if you really let it in that you are not a
problem
to be solved in any way?
Imagine you knew that anything that would tell you otherwise
is just a movement of thought in the mind that says ,"
Whatever is, isn't the way it is supposed to be."
So the biggest act of compassion starts within.
And when the self is no longer seen as a problem,
this is called "the peace that passes all
understanding."
~ Adyashanti
"The light of consciousness has no mind to change or alter
anything.
When you start to see the light that you really are,
the light waking up in you, the radiance,
you realize it has no intention to change you.
It has no intention to harmonize.
It has no agenda. It just happens.
The Truth is the only thing you'll ever run into that has no
agenda.
Everything else will have an agenda."
~ Adyashanti
Emptiness Dancing
Be still and know yourself as the Truth you have been searching
for.
Be still and let the inherent joy of that Truth capture your
drama
and destroy it in the bliss of consummation.
Be still and let your life be lived by the purpose you were made
for.
Be still and receive the inherent truth of your heart.
~ Gangaji
"Awakening to the truth is a deep realization of what you
are as an
experience.
What is it that is listening? What is it that is feeling?
Feel it. Sense it. Welcome it."
~ Adyashanti
Even in the running away from hurting, there is hurting.
In opening unprotected to the experience
that is enslaving you with its torment,
there is the willingness to be free.
Are you willing? Or do you just want to
wait until the world finally gets it and does it your way?
~ Gangaji
You must choose between your attachments and happiness.
~ Adyashanti
"All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant
emptiness of spirit
is to stop seeking something more or better or different,
and to turn your attention inward
to the awake silence that you are."
~ Adyashanti
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