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#4194 -
The Nonduality
Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
"Perhaps real wisdom
lies in not seeking answers at all. Any answer we find will
not be true for long. An answer is a place where we can
fall asleep as life moves past us to its next question.
After all these years I have begun to wonder if the secret of
living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing
unanswerable questions in good company."
from My Grandfather's Blessings, by Rachel Naomi Remen,
M.D. page 338
sent by David McMullin
Learn more about the
book My Grandfather's Blessings at
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1573228567/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=nondualitysal-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1573228567
James Waite
POPULAR DREAMS
Part One: Learning to be "you".
There probably has never
been a time in world history where man has been
more confused and distracted from reality. After twenty-one
centuries,
life and the living of it has gotten...complicated! It's a
learned
confusion, a learned distraction. It's a contemporary, cultivated
and
civilized dis-ease that holds us enthralled against our real
nature.
We learn who we should
be, what we should think is true and how we should
feel in making love and war. We're weaned off of our innocent,
open
essence, and intoduced to the idea that in order to survive and
prosper,
we must struggle. We lace up our gloves and step into the ring
determined
to change the world, to make it align with our expectations. We
join the
human Fight Club, and the life of "me"
vs."you", "mine" vs."yours". And
we do all this in our mind.
We consult our mind to
answer the central question of our birth: "What's
going on here?" The question turns our sublime
internal knowing to an
external "Who knows?" We begin to look everywhere and
anywhere outside our
self, to others, to authority figures, for the answers. Answers
we come to
fear. Answers we come to distrust. Answers that answer with
answers. We're
living in this house of mirrors, and we no longer see things for
what they
are- fragmented and fragmenting reflections of what we THINK is
going on.
From early childhood, our
thoughts and feelings are conditioned to accept
a socially proscribed range of emotions and reject the
rest. We learn how
to bury those truer feelings which are not encouraged and
supported by
our birth culture. In a word, we learn to resist. In two
words: to resist
and react. To react from our newly acquired attitudes and
conditioning
rather then act from the natural awareness we're born with. Of
course, we
never can lose this awareness which we are, but the Life of the
Mind we're
introduced to makes it seem hard to find our Self in all those
mirrors. We
lose our naked innocence, our pure and simple joy in the
reality of
living.
IT'S COMPLICATED!
I had a thought when I
was three,
Since then I've been dreaming I was "me".
Things get really
complicated really fast, don't they? We learn that in
our mind, we have lots and lots of possibilities, many, many
ways, both
good and bad, to see and experience things! We're all pretty
multi-media
maxed and overmedicated! And what with all the heavy decisions we
have to
make, and the opposing ways we feel about them,it's hard to
keep the show
on the road and rolling! Some days we sit stalled, out of gas,
out of
gear, unable to move in any direction. And we wonder to ourself:
" what's
this really all about?"
Well, in short, it's
about our mind generated ideas and feelings. It's
about who we think we are, and how those supposed thoughts cause
us to
feel the psychological, physical and spiritual aches and pains of
everyday
living. It's about our Popular Dreams!
Read more from James
Waite at