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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #4054, Sunday, October 24, 2010, Editor: Mark
If mind does not discriminate,
all things are as they are, as One.
To go to this mysterious source
frees us from all entanglements.
When all is seen with equal-mind,
to our self nature we return.
This single mind goes right beyond
all reasons and comparison.
- Kanchi Sosan Zenji, from the Great Vow Monastery chant book,
posted to DailyDharma
In the absence of intention there can be no
psychological basis for any involvement
with activity and events or their outcome.
There is then perfect alignment with
whatever might happen, an acceptance of
events without any feeling of either
achievement or frustration.
- Ramesh S. Balsekar, from A Net of Jewels, posted to
AlongTheWay
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the
point is to discover them.
- Galileo Galilei, posted to Distillation
To Sit In the Source of Being Is Self-inquiry
Mind is not a thing. It is a process of minding, thinking. Its
basic nature is to fragment the consciousness.
Mind is a like a crowd of politicians giving many self
contradictory speeches at the same time. This crowd in the mind
is not a fixed crowd but a changing crowd.
Thought is an acquired process. It is not our innate nature. That
is why there are no thoughts in deep sleep state. Thoughts of
belonging to a family, race, nationality, religion, profession,
caste, creed, cult etc are just utilitarian in nature.
Mind is a byproduct of upbringing, conditioning, education,
culture. Basically mind is an acquisition of habits and
identifying with them and then think we are that stuff.
If mind is in a state of thinking, consciousness in it becomes
opaque, non-transparent,
Just like on a cloudy day, you cannot see the blue sky. When the
clouds are not, you can see the sky. If we carefully observe we
will come to know that when one thought passes and before another
thought is yet to come there is an interval. That is the sky of
consciousness.
In that interval, in that gap you can feel the natural state of
our witnessing consciousness. But for many thoughts are so speedy
that they cannot feel the gap between one thought and the
another.
In Self-inquiry thought process is slowed down and we begin to
feel the gaps. So in Self-inquiry there is a fight for our innate
nature of witnessing consciousness against our mental habits.
Self-inquiry helps us to put aside the mental habits. It helps us
that which is natural to us, real 'I'.
Thinking belongs to the mind and witnessing is our innate nature.
So we cannot do both simultaneously. Thinking must cease for the
witnessing consciousness to be. Only through witnessing we reach
the reality.
Self-inquiry cannot have a fixed path for investigation.It is
just like driving a car in a busy city during rush hour and we
have to find the gaps to drive the car. Similarly in Self-inquiry
we have to be alert to find the gaps between thoughts and in the
interval between when mind changes from one mode to another
during transitional state. Only then 'being' can happen through
witnessing.
We cannot both sit and run with our legs at same time. Similarly
we cannot think and witness at same time simultaneously.
That is the art of Self-inquiry. We don't run after our thoughts
but we sit safely in the source of being which is our Self.
- Dr. Raju, from Luthar.com, posted to NondualitySalon
It was a happy realization for me, when I realized that I could
"escape anything" by simply being in the immediacy of
now. While that may sound "escapist", it is actually
the opposite, as what is immediate in this moment is the only
truth. What I realized was that by attending strictly to the
"sensations" in the moment there was no way that
"thought could get to me".
Regarding "sensations" above, recently it has occurred
to me that I should emphasized more that when I speak of the
"immediacy of the moment" I mean strictly the
"sensations" as experienced in the moment, Nothing
More! Each moment a new set of sensations, which are always
changing. Nothing adds up, nothing combines, each moment of new
sensations is independent, stands on its own.
If one attends to each moment of new sensations, regarding
anything that went before as "invalidated" by what is
new, then thought is experienced as just a series of changing
sensations. Same with emotion or anything else. So if anything
"upsetting" or unsettling would arise I would stop and
just pay attention to the panorama of sensation in continual flow
of change. What had been upsetting would become seen as just an
area where the sensations were particularly dense and agitated.
But by simply experiencing "as sensation" the dense and
agitated would soften and expand until melted away. And even when
dense and agitated it still wasn't a suffering (though you may
use that term differently), as it was just patterns of energy I
was experiencing. By shifting to experiencing as simply sensation
I had effectively "stripped away all content." (!!)
- Bill Rishel, posted to The_Now2