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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3703, Monday, November 1, 2009, Editor: Mark
Stop Being So Religious.
What
Do sad people have in
Common?
It seems
They have all built a shrine
To the past
And often go there
And do a strange wail and
Worship.
What is the beginning of
Happiness?
It is to stop being
So religious
Like That.
Hafiz, version by Daniel Ladinsky, from: The Gift
Why do you dote upon someone, my Soul,
who is not your true love ?
Why have you taken the false for the true?
Why can't you understand, why can't you know?
It is ignorance that binds you to the false,
To the ever-recurring wheel of birth and death,
this coming and going.
- Lalla
There's a moon in my body...
There's a moon in my body, but I can't see it!
A moon and a sun.
A drum never touched by hands, beating, and I can't hear it!
As long as a human being worries about when he will die, and what
he has that is his,
all of his works are zero.
When affection for the I-creature and what it owns is dead,
then the work of the Teacher is over.
The purpose of labor is to learn;
when you know it, the labor is over.
The apple blossom exists to create fruit; when that comes, the
petal falls.
The musk is inside the deer, but the deer does not look for it:
it wanders around looking for grass.
- Kabir
Listen, my friend, this road is the heart opening,
kissing his feet, resistance broken, tears all night.
If we could reach the Lord through immersion in water,
I would have asked to be born a fish in this life.
If we could reach Him through nothing but berries and wild nuts
then surely the saints would have been monkeys when they came
from the womb!
If we could reach him by munching lettuce and dry leaves
then the goats would surely get to the Holy One before us!
If the worship of stone statues could bring us all the way,
I would have adored a granite mountain years ago.
- Mirabai
You are granite.
I am an empty wine glass.
You know what happens when we touch!
You laugh like the sun coming up laughs
at a star that disappears into it.
Love opens my chest, and thought
returns to its confines.
Patience and rational considerations leave.
Only passion stays, whimpering and feverish.
Some men fall down in the road like dregs thrown out.
Then, totally reckless, the next morning,
they gallop out with new purposes.
Love is the Reality, and poetry is the drum
that calls us to that.
Don't keep complaining about loneliness!
Let the fear-language of that theme crack open
and float away.
Let the priest come down from his tower,
and not go back up!
- Rumi, Ghazal (Ode) 2357, from Molana's Diwan-e Shams-e
Tabrizi, version by Coleman Barks from The Essential Rumi,
posted to Sunlight
Who is it that loves and who that suffers?
He alone stages a play with Himself.
The individual suffers because he perceives duality.
Find the One everywhere and in everything
and there will be an end to pain and suffering.
- Sri Ananandamayi Ma