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#3629 - Wednesday, August 19, 2009
- Editor: Gloria Lee
Nonduality Highlights http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
within even it....
Slowly, slowly, I tended
the bellows of my throat,
and the light inside grew
and filtered out through
the dark, so that within
even it, I saw the truth.
- Lalla
14th Century North Indian mystic
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From "Naked Song"
Versions by Coleman Barks
posted to Along The Way
God created pain and sorrow that
happiness might show itself by contrast.
For hidden things are made manifest
by means of their opposites:
since God has no opposite, He is hidden.
- Rumi
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Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski
"Rumi: Daylight"
posted to Along The Way
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
posted to TheNow_2
Gaining Confidence in Awareness
John Astin
http://www.integrativearts.com/blog/?p=193
I recently heard a phrase which I believe comes out of the Tibetan non-dual tradition of Dzogchen, “gaining confidence in awareness.” That is the sense of what has been happening here and I believe, happening for many of the people I know who are engaged in this kind of investigation and inquiry. Awareness is first recognized to be the ever-present ground and source of all that is, the light of wakefulness that illumines all experience, the emptiness that dances as all form. But for most people, there is not initially a deep and abiding confidence in its ever-present nature. And so, seeking for it, seeking for something else, returns in all its many forms. It is in many ways, understandable that we would seemingly lose sight of the ever-present nature of awareness, for the simple reason that awareness cannot be seen. It is what is SEEING. But you see, the seeing is always happening, is it not? Something is always being seen, even if in certain moments, what is being seen is the sense that nothing is being seen or that what is being seen is somehow not quite enough. But, it doesn’t much matter what is there - pleasant, unpleasant, clear, confused, ordinary, extraordinary, a sense of remembering or forgetting, opening or closing - the seeing is always there at the center. It cannot be absent for everything that appears, appears to the seeing. Everything is illumined by that dark and invisible light. And, even more, everything IS none other than that light, the seen none other than the seeing. The seeing outshines everything for it IS everything. Never absent. Always present. And always, only ever now…
May we all gain confidence in this Friend we will never see, this awakeness that is beyond all points of view even as it shines in and through and as them all.
In the words of Adyashanti, “You are neither free nor bound, but ever-present.”
In Gratitude and Love…
John Astin
To my
granddaughters who visited the Holocaust
Museum on the day of the burial of Yitzhak Rabin
Now you
know the worst
we humans have to know
about ourselves, and I am sorry,
for I know
that you will be afraid.
To those of our bodies given
without pity to be burned, I know there is no answer
but loving one another,
even our enemies, and this is hard.
But
remember:
when a man of war becomes a man of peace,
he give a light, divine though it is also human.
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.
You do not
have to walk in darkness.
If you will have the courage for love,
you may walk in light. It will be
the light
of those who have suffered
for peace. It will be
your light.
~ Wendell
Berry ~
(A Timbered Choir)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/To_My_Granddaughters.html