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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #4393, Sunday, October 9, 2011
When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame
the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may
need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the
lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we
blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them,
they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive
effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and
argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no
argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show
that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
A saint inthe Buddhist context...is someone who provides an
example of the fact that completely ordinary, confused human
beings can wake themselves up; they can put themselves together
and wake themselves up through an accident of like of one kind or
another. The pain, the suffering of all kinds, the misery and the
chaos that are part of life, begins to wake them, shake them.
Having been shaken, they begin to question: "Who am I? What
am I? What is happening" Then they go further and realize
that there is something in them that is asking these questions,
something that is, in fact, intellingent and not exactly
confused.
- Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
The Absolute works with nothing.
The workshop, the materials
are what does not exist.
Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it.
Be a spot of ground where is nothing is growing,
where something might be planted,
a seed, possibly, from the Absolute.
- Rumi, Mathnawi V: 1960-64, version by Coleman Barks,
from The Essential Rumi, posted to Sunlight
To return to wholeness is to return home, to a place of being
where we are no longer in a state of conflict with our own
experience; where a genuine welcoming of all experience is
accessed.
Yet to really know wholeness, to really be aware of what it is,
requires a radical shift in where we're putting our attention.
We're all so conditioned to put our attention on the personal;
what's going on in my life, how I feel about others, what I need
to do to be content, etc., etc.
Yet there is this other part of life that is so easy to forget,
and that is the very essence of life; the intelligence of it.
This is what really experiencing wholeness brings us to, a total
cooperation with the big picture. And this means with everything
and everyone that this gorgeous life brings us.
Now remember, this isn't to be understood as a concept. Mind will
go "yeah, yeah I know this already." This is a feeling,
a very deep feeling that comes from true nature itself. It's a
true knowing, way beyond mind.
Yet interestingly enough, the return to wholeness begins in the
personal. The very perceptions and beliefs that can keep us in
illusion are actually doorways into wholeness. The question lies
in whether we are open and willing to take a peak into these
doorways, to be available to experience another possibility.
Because wholeness is being available to all possibilities, it's
pure potential. And that's what you and I are.
This cooperation that I'm speaking of comes out of surrender.
Once again, this surrender is not a concept, it's what let's go
when we question what we think we know. All it takes is a
questioning of your story; the one that's here right now, the
story that contains any beliefs about anything. Because in all
honesty, the return to wholeness will demand that everything is
questioned, that every doorway that's revealed within every
belief be looked into. That's what total cooperation is, and it
has a very high standard.
Yet the one that's looking, that's seeing it all, is only freeing
itself. It's wholeness returning to itself through this complete
cooperation with the totality. This cooperation brings with it
the beginning of a great intimacy with what is. It's the intimacy
that is the very longing of our hearts. It's what we are all
really striving for. This intimacy with life is the very
foundation of happiness.
- Joi Sharp
Know your own mind with honesty and fearlessness. See what leads
to more freedom and what leads to more suffering. This can
liberate you from continually getting hooked by self-centered
thoughts and emotions, the root of all dissatisfaction.
- Pema Chodron, from Always Maintain a Joyful Mind, posted
to DailyDharma
There is a stage at which, by touching a particular phase of
existence, one feels raised above the limitations of life and
given that power and peace and freedom, that light and life,
which belong to the source of all beings. In that moment of
supreme exaltation one is not only united with the source of all
beings, but dissolved in it, for the source of one's self. It is
just like touching the presence of God, when one's consciousness
has become so light and so liberated and free that it can raise
itself and dive and touch the depths of one's being.
From The Teachings Of Hazrat Inayat Khan, posted to
SufiMystic