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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #4358, Saturday, September 4, 2011
I do not know myself,
nor you, my Lord.
I mistook the body
for my identity.
I didn't know
that you are
me, and I you,
yet still I keep wondering
who you and I are.
- Lalla, from Naked Song - Versions by Coleman Barks,
posted to AlongTheWay
All beings are primarily Buddhas.
It is like water and ice:
There is no ice apart from water;
There are no Buddhas apart from beings.
Not knowing how close the truth is to them,
Beings seek for it afar - what a pity!
They are like those who, being in the midst of water,
Cry out for water, feeling thirst.
They are like the son of the rich man,
Who, wandering away from his father,
Goes astray amongst the poor.
It is all due to their ignorance
That beings transmigrate in the darkness
Of the Six Paths of existence.
When they wander from darkness to darkness,
How can they ever be free from birth-and-death?
As for the Dhyana practice as taught in the Mahayana,
No amount of praise can exhaust its merits.
The Six Paramitas - beginning with the Giving, Observing the
Precepts,
And other good deeds, variously enumerated,
Such as Nembutsu, Repentance, Moral Training, and so on -
All are finally reducible to the practice of Dhyana.
The merit of Dhyana practice, even during a single sitting,
Erases the countless sins accumulated in the past.
Where then are the Evil Paths to misguide us?
The Pure Land cannot be far away.
Those who, for once, listening to the Dharma
In all humility,
Praise it and faithfully follow it,
Will be endowed with innumerable merits.
But how much more so when you turn your eyes within yourselves
And have a glimpse into your self-nature!
You find that the self-nature is no-nature -
The truth permitting no idle sophistry.
For you, then, open the gate leading to the oneness of cause and
effect;
Before you, then, lies a straight road of non-duality and
non-trinity.
When you understand that form is the form of the formless,
Your coming-and-going takes place nowhere else but where you are.
When you understand that thought is the thought of the
thought-less.
Your singing-and-dancing is no other than the voice of the
Dharma.
How boundless is the sky of Samadhi!
How refreshingly bright is the moon of the Fourfold Wisdom!
Being so is there anything you lack?
As the Absolute presents itself before you
The place where you stand is the Land of the Lotus,
And your person - the body of the Buddha.
- Hakuin
Enlightenment is like nothing
you may have imagined or expected.
We're all earnestly seeking and hoping
to find something other than this
when, in reality, Realization is
a rediscovery and
a full, open-hearted acceptance
of This - exactly as it is.
- Metta Zetty
What determines ultimately whether your life has meaning or not
is whether the dimension of depth - the stillness, the
spaciousness, the formless essence - whether you realize that
within yourself.
- Eckhart Tolle, posted to Distillation
Still Here
Meeting all things today,
with their other sides intact
In the full emptiness,
all things have this balance:
light in dark, and dark in light
joy in sorrow, sorrow in joy.
Today it all comes together
without me.
Its amazing
how the world
all keeps happening
without my meaning-making
mechanisms,
Just as it is,
already finished, always in motion.
- Alice Gardner