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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #4027, Tuesday, September 28, 2010, Editor: Mark
There is a resting place, a starting place that you can always
return to. You can always bring your mind back home and rest
right here, right now, in present, unbiased awareness.
- Pema Chodron, posted to DailyDharma
We seem not to see that, as we march towards the next anticipated
"spiritual" high, the treasure that we seek is to be
discovered not in where we are going, but within the simple
nature of the very footsteps that we take. In our rush to find a
better situation in time, we trample over the flower of beingness
that presents itself in every moment.
- Tony Parsons, posted to AlongTheWay
Seekers continue to practice all kinds of self-torture without
realizing that such 'spiritual practice' is a reinforcement of
the very ego that prevents them from their natural, free state.
- Ramesh Balsekar, posted to ANetofJewels
Into What am I Inviting You?
Into what am I inviting you?
Into an appreciation of the spaciousness of Space?
Into a recognition of the completeness of the Whole?
Into an absorption into the vast expanse
of an inexplicable Fullness?
How can I argue convincingly for the value of something
I cannot adequately explain or describe,
except to assert, ceaselessly,
the substantive validity and undeniable certainty
of this all-encompassing Reality?
In the end, what more could I say except that
nothing more is ever needed?
- Metta Zetty
The Only Price
Life without a reason, a purpose, a position... the mind is
frightened of this because then "my life" is over with,
and life lives itself and moves from itself in a totally
different dimension. This way of living is just life moving.
That's all.
As soon as the mind pulls out an agenda and decides what needs to
change, that's unreality. Life doesn't need to decide who's right
and who's wrong. Life doesn't need to know the "right"
way to go because it's going there anyway. Then you start to get
a hint of why the mind, in a deep sense of liberation, tends to
get very quiet. It doesn't have its job anymore. It has its
usefulness, but it doesn't have its full-time occupation of
sustaining an intricately fabricated house of cards.
This stillness of awareness is all there is. It's all one. This
awareness and life are one thing, one movement, one happening, in
this moment -- unfolding without reason, without goal, without
direction. The ultimate state is ever present and always now. The
only thing that makes it difficult to find that state and remain
in that state is people wanting to retain their position in space
and time. "I want to know where I'm going. I want to know if
I've arrived. I want to know who to love and hate. I want to
know. I don't really want to be; I want to know. Isn't
enlightenment the ultimate state of knowing?" No. It's the
ultimate state of being. The price is knowing.
This is the beautiful thing about the truth: ever-present, always
here, totally free, given freely. It's already there. That which
is ever-presently awake is free, free for the "being."
But the only way that there's total and final absolute homecoming
is when the humanness presents itself with the same
unconditionality. Every time a human being touches into that
unconditionality, it's such peace and fulfillment.
In your humanity, there's the natural expression of joy and love
and compassion and caring and total unattachment. Those qualities
instantly transmute into humanness when you touch into emptiness.
Emptiness becomes love. That's the human experience of emptiness,
that source, that ever-present awakeness. For the humanness to
lay itself down -- your mind, your body, your hopes, your dreams,
everything -- to lay itself down in the same unconditional manner
in which awareness is ever present, only then is there the direct
experience of unity, that you and the highest truth are really
one thing. It expresses itself through your humanity, through
openness, through love. The divine becomes human and the human
becomes divine -- not in any "high and mighty" sense,
but just in the sense of reality. That's the way it is.
The only price is all of our positions. The only price is that
you stop paying a price.
- Adyashanti