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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3872, Saturday, April 24, 2010, Editor: Mark
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, version by Coleman Barks, from Naked Song, posted
to AlongTheWay
Above all else, we need to nourish our true self - what we can
call our buddha nature - for so often we make the fatal mistake
of identifying with our confusion, and then using it to judge and
condemn ourselves, which feeds the lack of self-love that so many
of us suffer from today.
How vital it is to refrain from the temptation to judge ourselves
or the teachings, and to be humorously aware of our condition,
and to realize that we are, at the moment, as if many people all
living in one person.
And how encouraging it can be to accept that from one perspective
we all have huge problems, which we bring to the spiritual path
and which indeed may have led us to the teachings, and yet to
know from another point of view that ultimately our problems are
not so real or so solid, or so insurmountable as we have told
ourselves.
- Sogyal Rinpoche, posted to Distillation
I have stilled my restless mind, and my heart is
radiant: for in That-ness I have seen beyond
That-ness, in company I have seen the Comrade Himself.
Living in bondage, I have set myself free: I have
broken away from the clutch of all narrowness.
Kabir says: "I have attained the unattainable,
and my heart is coloured with the colour of love."
- Kabir, translated by Rabindranath Tagore, from Songs of
Kabir, posted to AlongTheWay
This "I am realization," this sense of your own
presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the
thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new
dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the
thought, you feel a conscious presence - your deeper self -
behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then
loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no
longer energizing the mind through identification with it.
As you go more deeply into this realm of no-mind, as it is
sometimes called in the East, you realize the state of pure
consciousness. In that state, you feel your own presence with
such intensity and such joy that all thinking, all emotions, your
physical body, as well as the whole external world become
relatively insignificant in comparison to it. And yet this is not
a selfish but a selfless state. It takes you beyond what you
previously thought of as "your self." That presence is
essentially you and at the same time inconceivably greater than
you. What I am trying to convey here may sound paradoxical or
even contradictory, but there is no other way that I can express
it.
- Eckhart Tolle, posted to The_Now2
- Katherine, from GreatFreedom.org: http://vimeo.com/11042298