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 #4136, Sunday, January 16, 2011, Editor: Mark
The Story of a Story
Once upon a time there was a story
Its end came
before its beginning
And its beginning came
After its end
Its heroes entered it
After their death
And left it
Before their birth
Its heroes talked
About some earth about some heaven
The said all sorts of things
Only they didn't say
What they themselves didn't know
That they are only heroes in a story
In a story whose end comes
Before its beginning
And whose beginning comes
after its end
. - Vasko Popa, translated from the Serbo-Croat by Anne
Pennington, from Staying Alive,edited by Neil Astley,
posted to The_Now2
Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of
comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a
summer day.
Bertrand Russell, posted to Distillation
Ram Tzu has a question for you
You believe in yourself.
You believe in
The power of positive thinking.
You attend seminars
To gain control of your life.
Once again you become pregnant
With visions of limitless opportunities,
All yours for the grabbing.
You need merely to
Set your goals
Define your wants
Establish priorities.
Then you can march off
To claim all
That is rightfully yours.
Ram Tzu has a question for you...
What went wrong this time?
- Ram Tzu, from No Way for the Spiritually
"Advanced," posted to AlongTheWay
By overlaying a subjective grid-work on the
world through your definitions and beliefs, you
vainly try to artificially divide the indivisible.
Beneath all of your ego-based interpretations,
however, the Absolute persists undisturbed and is
completely untouched by everything that you think,
feel, say and do.
Meanwhile, though, you're still struggling to
frantically write the story of your life on the watery
surface of an Eternal Ocean.
But you're using an icicle pen!
- Chuck Hillig, from Seeds for the Soul, posted to
AlongTheWay
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their
only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one
pedestal after another of previous convictions about our
centrality in the cosmos.
- Stephen Jay Gould, posted to Distillation
Always be present, attentive, and ready in yourself
If a blow comes to you from Heaven,
be alert to a gift of honor after it;
for He is not the King to slap you
without giving you a crown
and a throne on which to rest.
The whole world is worth only a gnat's wing,
but a single slap may bring an infinite reward.
Slip your neck nimbly out of this golden collar
that is the world, and take the slaps that come from God.
The prophets suffered those blows on the neck,
and from that affliction they lifted their heads high.
But always be present, attentive, and ready in yourself,
youthful one, in order that He may find you at home.
Otherwise He will take back His gift of honor,
saying "I found no one there."
- Rumi, Mathnawi VI: 1638-1643, version by Camille and
Kabir Helminski, from Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance, posted
to Sunlight