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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3472, Sunday, March 15, 2009, Editor: Mark
To know itself the self must be faced with its opposite - the
not-self. Desire leads to experience. Experience leads to
discrimination, detachment, self-knowledge - liberation. And what
is liberation after all? To know that you are beyond birth and
death. By forgetting who you are and imagining yourself a mortal
creature, you created so much trouble for yourself that you have
to wake up, like from a bad dream.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj, posted to ANetofJewels
Enlightenment is awakening from the dream state of separateness
to the reality of One. It means waking up to what you truly are
and then being that. Realize and be. Realization is not enough.
After Self-realization one must act, do and express what one has
realized. This is a whole new way of life -living in reality
instead of living out the programmed ideas, beliefs, and impulses
of your mind.
The truth is that you already are what you are seeking. You are
looking for God with his eyes. This truth is so simple, shocking
and radical that it is easy to miss among one's flurry of
seeking. He is here to shake his students awake and not to ask
them to dream better. We must wake up to the fact that we are all
already living Buddhas. We are the emptiness, the infinite
nothing. Let go of all ideas and images in our minds: they come
and go and are not even generated by us.
- Adyashanti
How can that be - empty space that is full of everything that
matters? The mind cannot grasp it fully, as presence exists
beyond concepts and even beyond its own forms; and yet, that is
what you are. You can experience it with more subtle senses than
the physical senses and the mind. Ultimately, you
"sense" it by being it. You just are this full empty
presence.
It is this second movement of realization of essence, presence,
and fullness of Being that counteracts the belief that since I
(as ego) do not exist, therefore nothing exists and all is
illusion. It gives a heartfelt sense of meaning and purpose back
to this relative life of the body and mind, not as a means of
gratification to your idea of yourself, but as a pure expression
of the wonder and beauty of this deeper reality. Instead of
living a life in service to the ego's wants and needs, you can
find yourself fulfilling the deepest purposes of a human life: to
serve and express freedom, joy, beauty, peace and love. By itself
the realizatio of no-self can end up dry and lifeless, but when
the heart opens wide to the bigger truth of the true Self, life
is anything but dry and lifeless.
- Nirmala, from Beyond No Self
The understanding of Truth is not a matter of time. Indeed, it is
prior to the concept of time. When it takes place, it happens
suddenly, almost as a shock of timeless apprehension. It means a
sudden cessation of the process of duration, a split-second when
the functioning of time itself is suspended and integration takes
place with what is prior to relativity -- direct apprehension of
the Absolute.
- Ramesh Balsekar, posted to ANetofJewels