Just a little information for those who are UK
based ... on an impending visit to the UK/London of Namkai Norbu
... world renowned Dzogchen master .... May 28 - June 2.
I love Jesus, who said to
us:
heaven and earth will pass away.
When heaven and earth have passed away,
my word will still remain.
What was your word, Jesus?
Love? Forgiveness? Affection?
All your words were
one word: Wakeup.
~ Antonio
Machado ~ (Translated by Robert Bly, in The Soul Is Here For Its Own Joy)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Proverbios_VII.html
Guidelines to Life:
Show up;
Pay attention:
Tell the truth;
Don't judge;
Be compassionate;
Express silent gratitude to everyone for
showing up in your dream. (After all, they're
only here to support your own awakening.)
Above all, don't be attached to the results of
your efforts.
There are only two real choices:
1) Resist what shows up for you in life
and then, grudgingly, finally learn to accept it,
or
2) Consciously choose what shows up for
you in life and then, lovingly, embrace it being
just as it is.
- Chuck Hillig
posted to Along The Way
Understanding Is Like Water
Understanding is like water flowing in a stream. Wisdom and
knowledge are solid and can block our understanding. In Buddhism,
knowledge is regarded as an obstacle for understanding. If we
take something to be the truth, we may cling to it so much that
even if the truth comes and knocks at our door, we won't want to
let it in. We have to be able to transcend our previous knowledge
the way we climb up a ladder. If we are on the fifth rung and
think that we are very high, there is no hope for us to step up
to the sixth. We must learn to transcend our own views.
Understanding, like water, can flow, can penetrate. Views,
knowledge, and even wisdom are solid, and can block the way of
understanding.
- Thich Nhat Hanh, “The Heart Sutra”
What's forgotten is that state of
simplicity.That paradox of the immensity of existence, of
life here and now.The fullness of it and the absolute
emptiness of it.It's that quiet immensity.I
was reading an old journal of mine from the mid 1980's and in it
was this wonderful quote from, actually quite a few wonderful
quotes from Thomas Merton that I had written down.I used
to love reading Thomas Merton.But he had this very beautiful,
this one line this one description and he called it the abyss of
freedom.And I loved that because he's linking that very
paradoxical words that only someone who's experienced that
abyss of freedom will know what he is talking about.That
abyss of freedom.Everybody wants freedom, not everybody
wants the abyss. The emptiness of freedom.The
disappearance to just a simplicity, a quietness that takes
paradoxically because I am speaking but takes the words away from
us.In other words takes away the inner dialog away from us
and we actually begin to live in that abyss of freedom rather
than to talk to ourselves about that.
And so when you stop looking in the high
places for truth but look in the low places, the places that are
obscure, the places where nobody pays any attention.That's
where you'll find what you are.That's where it will become
obvious.When you start to pay attention to what you don't
usually pay attention to, what's quiet.Not clamoring
inside of you for attention. What's not insisting.What's
not trying to take some sort of spiritual stance.That in
you which does not have a theology whether it's dualistic or
nondualistic. That simplicity.That very simple shining
emptiness.Very easy to forget that that's what its about.That's what brings self-liberation.That's what takes us
beyond our own self-obsession.Wakes us up from the dream
cause that's the awakening.Suddenly you're awake from the
dream of being obsessed with yourself.Past, future.You
awaken even from the obsession with being a self.Because
that's all being a self is, it's an obsession.One thought
obsessing on another thought obsessing on another thought
obsessing on another thought until it spins the illusion of a
self into existence.
All was taken away from you: white
dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe in you,
messengers.
There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seems.
Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.
They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.
The voice -- no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightening.
I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
