Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nonduality Highlights each day
How to submit material to the Highlights
#3871 -
Thursday, April 22, 2010 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
I have not really known myself,
or anyone else.
I've tried to do good, and not
just what my appetites wanted,
but that was all infatuation
with this precious, isolated, body.
That you and I were constantly joining,
I didn't know. I didn't know
that even to ask "What are You?"
or "Who am I" breaks the harmony.
- Lalla
14th Century North Indian mystic
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
From "Naked Song"
Versions by Coleman Barks
posted to Along The Way
Big Sky Mind
Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa
Rinpoche described panoramic awareness as “a state without
center or fringe” in which there is no watcher or perceiver,
no division between subject and object. With a Big Mind, one does
not view the sky, as eleventh-century Zen Master Dogen said most
people do, by looking up at it “through a bamboo tube.”
Instead, the distinction between self and other is abolished in
the experience of the empty sky itself.
- Rick Fields, "Buddhism and the Beat Generation"
The little space
within the heart is as great as the vast
universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and
the moon and
the stars. Fire and lightning and winds are there, and all that
now is and
all that is not. - The
Upanishads
It comes to this
paradox--that the farther they travel on the path of ego-effort,
the farther they move from their goal, and the less they try to
approach their Source the closer they come to it!
— Notebooks of Paul Brunton posted
to Wisdom-l by Mark Scorelle
Sacred and Mundane
I blow out the candles. I clean the table and stove using
super-cleaning microfiber cloths that require only hot water
rather than chemicals. I apply elbow grease.
These forms of attention are more mundane and difficult for me to
practice than the ecstasy I often feel on the mountain. Yet they
too express a reverence for the natural world and an
understanding of interdependence... Ultimately, Dogen says,
housewifery and ecstasy are not that different. “Taking up a
green vegetable, turn it into a sixteen-foot golden body,”
he challenges me.
- Katy Butler, "Everything is Holy"
Words can never convey the beauty of a tree; to understand it, you must see it with your own eyes. Language cannot capture the melody of a song; to understand it, you must hear it with your own ears. So it is with the Tao: the only way to understand it is to directly experience it. The subtle truth of the universe is unsayable and unthinkable. Therefore the highest teachings are wordless. My own words are not the medicine, but a prescription; not the destination, but a map to help you reach it. When you get there, quiet your mind and close your mouth. Don't analyze the Tao. Strive instead to live it: silently, undividedly, with your whole harmonious being. http://www.cheraglibrary.org/taoist/hua-hu-ching.htm
A SLEEP OF PRISONERS
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul we ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity's sake!
- Christopher Fry