Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nonduality Highlights each day
How to submit material to the Highlights
Nonduality Highlights: Issue #4121, Saturday, January 1, 2011
All happiness comes from awareness. The more we are conscious,
the deeper the joy. Acceptance of pain, non-resistance, courage
and endurance - these open deep and perennial sources of real
happiness, true bliss.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj, posted to ANetofJewels
When the mind is possessed of Reality,
it feels tranquil and joyous even without music or song,
and it produces a pure fragrance
even without incence or tea.
- author unknown, from A Chinese Garden of Serenity,
Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Monk, posted to DailyDharma
An inquirer asked a teacher, How can I command whatever happens
to me?
By being one with whatever happens.
What does that mean?
You really do not possess a separate self which is apart from
anything; you are one with all of life. However, in your
misunderstanding you think there is a you AND an event, which
causes division and conflict. This is the secret of the ages.
Come back to it every day. You will change!
Vernon Howard Inspire Yourself, posted to The_Now2
The Self
It is small and no more visible than a cricket
in August. It likes to dress up, to masquerade,
as all dwarfs do. It lodges between
granite blocks, between serviceable
truths. It even fits under
a bandage, under adhesive. Neither customs officers
nor their beautiful dogs will find it. Between
hymns, between alliances, it hides itself.
It camps in the Rocky Mountains of the skull.
An eternal refugee. It is I and I,
with the fearful hope that I have found at last
a friend, am it. But the self
is so lonely, so distrustful, it does not
accept anyone, even me.
It clings to historical events
not less tightly than water to a glass.
I could fill a Neolithic jar.
It is insatiable, it wants to flow
in aquaducts, it thirsts for newer & newer vessels.
It wants to taste space without walls,
diffuse itself. Then it fades away
like desire, and in the silence of an August
night you hear only crickets patiently
conversing with the stars.
- Adam Zagajewski, posted to The_Now2
Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some
wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your
self-realization. You are not to expect an explosion, for the
explosion has already happened - at the moment you were born,
when you realized yourself as being-knowing-feeling. There is
only one mistake you are making. You take the inner for the outer
and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be
outside you and what is outside you take to be in you. The mind
and feelings are external, but you take them to be internal. You
believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a
projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion and no new
explosion will set it right. You have to think yourself out of
it. There is no other way.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj, posted to ANetofJewels
I Wasn't In This Poem
I wasn't in this poem,
only gleaming pools,
a lizards tiny eye, the wind
and the sounds of a harmonica
pressed to not my lips.
- Adam Zagajewski, posted to The_Now2
Spiritual birth is realizing
your nothingness,
everythingness,
and somebodyness.
- Adyashanti, Gateways to Clarity
There are lots of cool audio recordings of Adyashanti at Cafe
Dharma: http://www.adyashanti.org/cafedharma/index.php?file=library_audio ,
including this free offering: Divine Indifference.