Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nonduality Highlights each day
How to submit material to the Highlights
#3998 - Monday, August 30, 2010 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
nyone who enjoys inner peace is no
more broken by failure than he is
inflated by success. He is able to fully live his
experiences in the context
of a vast and profound serenity, since he understands that
experiences
are ephemeral and that it is useless to cling to them.
There will be no
“hard fall” when things turn bad and he is
confronted with adversity. He
does not sink into depression, since his happiness rests on
a solid
foundation. One year before her death at Auschwitz, the
remarkable
Etty Hillesum, a young Dutchwoman, affirmed: “When you have
an
interior life, it certainly doesn’t matter what side of the
prison you’re on.
. . . I’ve already died a thousand times in a thousand
concentration camps.
I know everything. There is no new information to trouble
me. One way or
another, I already know everything, and yet, I find this
life beautiful
and rich in meaning. At every moment.”
Changing the way we see the world
does not imply a naive optimism or
some artificial euphoria designed to counterbalance adversity. So
long as
we are slaves to the dissatisfaction and frustration that arise
from the
confusion that rules our minds, it will be just as futile to tell
ourselves
“I’m happy!” over and over again as it would be to
repaint a wall in ruins.
The search for happiness is not about looking at life through
rose-colored glasses or blinding oneself to the pain and
imperfections of
the world. Nor is happiness a state of exaltation to be
perpetuated at all
costs; it is the purging of mental toxins such as hatred and
obsession
that literally poison the mind. It is also about learning how to
put things
in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and
reality. To
that end we must acquire a better knowledge of how the mind works
and
a more accurate insight into the nature of things, for in its
deepest
sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the
nature
of reality.
- Matthieu Ricard, "A Way of Being"
full article: http://www.tricycle.com/insights/way-being
Essential Silence
There is an essential silence that continually blesses us all. I
feel it
as I type words into the void. It unreels like an old movie, the
kind
where no voice was able to be heard. It breathes life into
the words of
this world. It animates everything. Trees know it and rocks
absorb and
emit it. Stars beam it down to us in the form of light. How
blessed we
are to be that silence and to share it freely. We do that because
it is
effortless. A strained silence is noisy whereas essential silence
is a
benediction on this weary world.
The silence seeps in around the cracks of suffering. Like light,
it is
who we are. As love, it transforms ugliness into grace and grace
into
miracle. I tend a piece of this silence. I am farming it so that
flowers
grow tall and the soul’s lushness is revealed petal by
petal, word by word.
Silence is the essence of us all. The void from which we spring
peppers
the world with hallelujahs. It softens the suffering soul and
revives
the desert landscape. It also shows us the beauty of the desert
and the
dark valleys of loss. Lest I become overwrought, I shall stop
on a
dime’s worth of words so you can feel like a millionaire
within it all.
Vicki Woodyard
http://www.vickiwoodyard.com
More photos by Alan Larus
http://www.ferryfee.com/Bluesky/Shores/Yesterday_and_today.html
http://www.ferryfee.com/Bluesky/Shores/Yesterday_and_today_2.html
THE CORNUCOPIA
Grapes grow up a
difficult and
sloped terrain. A soft line of poplars
shimmer in the disappearing light.
At midnight, the poor move
into the train stations of Italy,
spread out blankets for the children,
and pretend to the police they have tickets
and are waiting for a train.
The statue of
Bacchus is a contrast
with his right hand holding a shallow but
wine-brimming cup. His left hand
reaches easily into the cornucopia
where grapes ripen and burst open.
It is a vivid dream: to wake
from the statue's grace and life force
to the suffering in the streets.
But the truth is the
cornucopia
is open to all who are alive,
who look and feel the world in
its pristine beauty -- as a dragonfly
hovering in the sunlight over clear
water; and who feel the world
as a luminous world -- as green plankton
drifting at night in the sea.
~ Arthur Sze ~
(The
Redshifting Web)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/The_Cornucopia.html
Web archive of Panhala postings: www.panhala.net/Archive/Index.html