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#3843 - Monday, March
22, 2010 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
The Name of a Fish
by Faith Shearin
If winter is a house
then summer is a window
in the bedroom of that house. Sorrow is a river
behind the house and happiness is the name
of a fish who swims downstream. The unborn child
who plays the fragrant garden is named Mavis:
her red hair is made of future and her sleek feet
are wet with dreams. The cat who naps
in the bedroom has his paws in the sun of summer
and his tail in the moonlight of change. You and I
spend years walking up and down the dusty stairs
of the house. Sometimes we stand in the bedroom
and the cat walks towards us like a message.
Sometimes we pick dandelions from the garden
and watch the white heads blow open
in our hands. We are learning to fish in the river
of sorrow; we are undressing for a swim.
from The Owl Question. © Utah State
University Press, 2002. posted
to The Writer's Almanac 3/18/10
By making peace with the
present moment....That present moment is the field on which the
game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. Once
you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens,
what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through
you. There are three words that convey the secret of the art
of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With
Life. Being one with life is being one with now. You then
realize that you don't live your life, but life lives
you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.
From: Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth)
Keeping Balanced
Wisdom can teach us to separate people’s
actions from who they are. We can agree or disagree with their
actions, but remain balanced in our relationship with a person.
Or we can understand that our own thoughts and impulses are the
result of impersonal conditions. By not taking them so
personally, we are more likely to stay at ease with their
arising.
One of the most powerful ways to use wisdom to facilitate
equanimity is to be mindful of when equanimity is absent. Honest
awareness of what makes us imbalanced helps us to learn how to
find balance. Wisdom can also be an important factor in learning
to have an accepting awareness, to be present without the mind or
heart contracting or resisting.
- Gil Fronsdal, "A Perfect Balance"
In reality compassion is never willfully produced. Rather, it flows as a result of a fundamental recognition of Truth, and the embodiment of that recognition. As Dante said in The Divine Comedy, "Blessedness comes from seeing; not from loving, which comes later." See, and love flows. Released from the confines of the imaginary me, it cannot help but flood into the world, for it is the world.
And so my
practice is clear: it is to get out of the way of Love. Seeing
no one here, the gate opens for the movement of compassion, and I
find no way to resist you, nothing with which to keep out the
world.
The Light That I Am by J.C.Amberchele
chapter:
Compassion, pp. 47-8
posted to Wisdom-l by Mark Scorelle
Transforming the World
On the night of the Buddha’s enlightenment, he is said to
have understood that everything is completely interconnected and
interdependent. Therefore it is impossible for anybody to go on
retreat from the world. Everybody knows that when you go on
retreat, the whole world, no matter how tiny your retreat cabin,
is there, in terms of your experience. And the purpose of retreat
is precisely to transform the world.
- Richard Reoch, “The Path of Complete Engagement”
You are not that, you are
aware of that. If you hold to the intuition, the sense "I
am", and don't allow this to connect with any other concept;
if you just let the "I am" incubate in itself,
inmediately joy and space prevails. Spontaneously, there is the
silent and intuitive conviction: "I am timeless, unbound
being." This is not a teaching, it's a powerful inner
experience, inexplicable. Thankfully, you don't have to write a
thesis about it. Something it is seen, it's enough. You cannot
prove it and you needn't prove it. You don't need to talk about
it, or even to share it. Keep quiet.
Remain in the natural inner solitude.
- Extract from Mooji's book "Before I am", page 26.
posted to Wisdom-l by Mark Scorelle
Winter at Bogstad, with dog on the run. by Alan Larus