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#3482 - Wednesday, March 25,
2009 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Concentration
A young and rather boastful
champion challenged a Zen master
who was renowned for his skill as an archer. The young man
demonstrated remarkable technical proficiency when he hit a
distant bull's eye on his first try, and then split that arrow
with his second shot. "There," he said to the old man,
"see if you
can match that!" Undisturbed, the master did not draw his
bow,
but rather motioned for the young archer to follow him up the
mountain. Curious about the old fellow's intentions, the
champion followed him high into the mountain until they reached
a deep chasm spanned by a rather flimsy and shaky log. Calmly
stepping out onto the middle of the unsteady and certainly
perilous bridge, the old master picked a far away tree as a
target, drew his bow, and fired a clean, direct hit. "Now it
is
your turn," he said as he gracefully stepped back onto the
safe
ground. Staring with terror into the seemingly bottomless and
beckoning abyss, the young man could not force himself to step
out onto the log, no less shoot at a target. "You have much
skill
with your bow," the master said, sensing his challenger's
predicament, "but you have little skill with the mind that
lets
loose the shot."
Gill Eardley
http://allspirit.co.uk
Enlightenment is but a
recognition, not a change at all.
So instead of working so hard and struggling to
"improve" who I think I am - all I really need do is
remember who I truly am.
- Adyashanti
Our true nature is that simple and
undeniable presence
of awareness that illumines all thinking, feeling and
perceiving. Always present and radiantly clear, it is never
obscured by time, circumstances or thoughts. The
body, mind and world rise and set in awareness and
have no independent existence apart from awareness.
Awareness, your real being, is all there is. You are not
the limited person you have taken yourself to be. Look
for the separate self and you find it entirely absent.
Seeing this, suffering, doubt and confusion effortlessly
drop away, revealing your natural state of innate hap-
piness and freedom. Understanding who you are is
immediately and always available - here and now.
- John Wheeler Shining
in Plan View
Non-duality Press, 2005 Posted
to Along The Way
Jan Frazier,
teacher from Vermont quote
Watch the mind – but don't judge what you see it doing. Neither berate yourself nor congratulate yourself. Don't beat yourself up for what you "catch yourself" doing, even if it's for the umpteenth time. It isn't a tender-hearted, self-forgiving stance that leads me to urge this nonjudgmental approach. I'm not saying "love and accept yourself for all your warts." The point is, it's neither here nor there, how your mind judges what you do. It's the judging that's the problem: because it indicates you're taking too seriously the life of the mind. If you are hard on yourself (or praise yourself) for the activity in your head, you are giving your mind power over you. The point is to not invest any of it with substantiality. Any kind of judgment only feeds the ego with the illusion that this stuff is valuable. Starve the ego to death: its ongoing vitality is like a wall that keeps you from seeing clearly who you really are.
Learning to laugh at the antics of the blustering, self-important ego will probably get you farther than all the heartfelt, earnest, self-flagellating striving in the world. Never forget that you have built that wall, just by participating in the human condition (which includes the mind, with its enormous power to delude, and all the conditioning that tells us untruths about who we are). You can destroy the wall – not brick by brick but all at once. This very moment.
--Jan Frazier
http://whenfearfallsaway.com/index.html
Author of When Fear Falls Away
Weiser Books more excerpts:
online google books
In August 2003, virtually overnight, Jan Frazier experienced
"a dramatic falling away of fear"--not just the... more » posted to Wisdom-l by Mark Scorelle