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#3787 -
Monday, January 25, 2010 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Stanley Sobottka starting February 1st
Consider yourself both privileged
and lucky: Stanley Sobottka, Professor Emeritus of Physics from
the University of Virginia hosts the StillnessSpeaks Open
Awareness Study Group starting February 1st.
This is a rare opportunity to look through the crystal of
non-duality from the perspective of Quantum Physics and
Consciousness from a true expert: Stanley is Stanford educated
and taught Physics at UVA for 32 years before retiring in 1996.
In 1991, Stanley encountered and was deeply affected by the book,
"I Am That" by Nisargadatta Maharaj. In 1992, he
realized that a credible scientific basis could be made regarding
Advaita, or non-duality. Thus, Stanley came to develop the well
known and much discussed curriculum, A Course in Consciousness,
an invaluable resource when one attempts to reconcile advaita and
western science.
In a change in format, Stanley will actually teach the first six
chapters from his class entitled A Course in Consciousness.
Questions will be directed to the chapter(s) assigned in the
current week. Chapters 1 and 2 will be the subject of
questions for that period. Those attending will be encouraged to
explore how science supports the non-dual understanding.
http://faculty.virginia.edu/consciousness/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OAStudyGroup/
Precious Silence
Those who are fond of retreats—writers, ecstatics,
parents with young children—often comment on the silence
such time away allows. Silence becomes something present, almost
palpable. The task shifts from keeping the world at a safe
decible distance to letting more of the world in. Thomas Aquinas
said that beauty arrests motion. He meant, I think, that in the
presence of something gorgeous or sublime, we stop our nervous
natterings, our foot twitchings and restless tongues. Whatever
that fretful hunger is, it seems momentarily filled in the
presence of beauty. To Aquinas’s wisdom I’d add that
silence arrests flight, that in its refuge, the need to flee the
chaos of noise diminishes. We let the world creep closer, we drop
to our knees, as if to let the heart, like a small animal, get
its legs on the ground.
- Barbara Hurd, "On Silence"
photo by Alan Larus
The pictures are from Geiranger and there are some old
and tiny 'farms' in the fjords.
They had the advantage of being out of reach for the taxman and
thieves as a part of the path has ladders and ropes.
Breaking
Identification with the Pain-Body
"A person with a strong, active pain-body has a
particular energy emanation that other people perceive as
extremely unpleasant. When they meet such a person, some people
will immediately want to remove themselves or reduce interaction
with him or her to a minimum. They feel repulsed by the person's
energy field. Others will feel a wave of aggression toward this
person, and they will be rude or attack him or her verbally and
in some cases, even physically. This means there is something
within them that resonates with the other person's pain-body.
What they react to so strongly is also in them.
It is their own pain-body. Not surprisingly, people with heavy
and frequently active pain-bodies often find themselves in
conflict situations. Sometimes, of course, they actively
provoke them. But at other times, they may not actually do
anything. The negativity they emanate is enough to attract
hostility and generate conflict. It requires a high degree of
Presence to avoid reacting when confronted by someone with such
an active pain-body. If you are able to stay present, it
sometimes happens that your Presence enables the other person to
disidentify from his or her own pain-body and thus experience the
miracle of a sudden awakening. Although the awakening may be
short-lived, the awakening process will have become initiated.
One of the first such awakenings that I witnessed happened many
years ago. My doorbell rang close to eleven o'clock at night. My
neighbor Ethel's anxiety-laden voice came through the intercom.
"We need to talk. This is very important. Please let me
in." Ethel was middle-aged, intelligent, and highly
educated. She also had a strong ego and a heavy pain-body. She
escaped from Nazi Germany when she was an adolescent, and many of
her family members perished in the concentration camps.
Ethel sat down on my sofa, agitated,
her hands trembling. She took letters and documents out of the
file she carried with her and spread them out all over the sofa
and floor. At once I had the strange sensation as if a dimmer
switch had turned the inside of my entire body to maximum
power. There was nothing to do other than remain open,
alert, intensely present—present with every cell of the
body. I looked at her with no thought and no judgment and
listened in stillness without any mental commentary.
A torrent of words came out of her mouth. "They sent me
another disturbing letter today.
They are conducting a vendetta against me. You must help. We need
to fight them together. Their crooked lawyers will stop at
nothing. I will lose my home. They are threatening me with
dispossession."
It transpired that she refused to pay
the service charge because the property managers had failed to
carry out some repairs. They in turn threatened to take her to
court. She talked for ten minutes or so. I sat, looked, and
listened. Suddenly she stopped talking, looked at the papers all
around her as if she had just woken up from a dream. She became
calm and gentle. Her entire energy field changed. Then she looked
at me and said, "This isn't important at all, is it?"
"No, it isn't," I said. She sat quietly for a couple
more minutes, then picked up her papers and left. The next
morning she stopped me in the street, looking at me somewhat
suspiciously. "What did you do to me? Last night was the
first night in years that I slept well. In fact, I slept like a
baby."
She believed I had "done
something" to her, but I had done nothing. Instead of asking
what I had done to her, perhaps she should have asked what I had
not done. I had not reacted, not confirmed the reality of her
story, not fed her mind with more thought and her pain-body with
more emotion.
I had allowed her to experience
whatever she was experiencing at that moment, and the power of
allowing lies in noninterference, non-doing. Being present is
always infinitely more powerful than anything one could say or
do, although sometimes being present can give rise to words or
actions.
What happened to her was not yet a permanent shift, but a glimpse
of what is possible, a glimpse of what was already within her. In
Zen, such a glimpse is called satori. Satori is a moment of
Presence, a brief stepping out of the voice in your head, the
thought processes, and their reflection in the body as emotion.
It is the arising of inner spaciousness where before there was
the clutter of thought and the turmoil of emotion.
The thinking mind cannot understand Presence and so will often
misinterpret it.
It will say that you are uncaring, distant, have no compassion,
are not relating. The truth is, you are relating but at a level
deeper than thought and emotion. In fact, at that level there is
a true coming together, a true joining that goes far beyond
relating. In the stillness of Presence, you can sense the
formless essence in yourself and in the other as one. Knowing the
oneness of yourself and the other is true love, true care, true
compassion."
Eckhart Tolle
http://www.pbase.com/1heart/image/77872041/large
posted by Mazie Lane
The Real Jim Carrey on www.youtube.com http://enter.eckharttolletv.com
Jim Carrey as you have never seen him before. His honest, candid, humble self discussing openly his life-long pursuit for meaning and purpose, his encounters with Awakening ...