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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #4424, Saturday, November 12, 2011
Waiting
Once, more than once, though long ago now,
you whispered into my mind, so clearly,
words I had not hoped to hear; words
I didn't always understand but would die for now.
The days since are long and aimless.
The books set aside. The questions withered.
There is nothing that needs to be said or done.
Only this waiting, this wondering or forgetting to wonder,
this walking through a life which isn't a life, which is only a
door
waiting to be opened.
- Ashley, posted to The_Now2
A Children's Game
Listen to the poet Sanai,
who lived secluded: "Don't wander out on the road
in your ecstasy. Sleep in the tavern."
When a drunk strays out to the street,
children make fun of him.
He falls down in the mud.
He takes any and every road.
The children follow,
not knowing the taste of wine, or how
his drunkenness feels. All people on the planet
are children, except for a very few.
No one is grown up except those free of desire.
God said,
"The world is a play, a children's game,
and you are the children."
God speaks the truth.
If you haven't left the child's play,
how can you be an adult?
Without purity of spirit,
if you're still in the middle of lust and greed
and other wantings, you're like children
playing at sexual intercourse.
They wrestle
and rub together, but it's not sex!
The same with the fightings of mankind.
It's a squabble with play-swords.
No purpose, totally futile.
Like kids on hobby horses, soldiers claim to be riding
Boraq, Muhammad's night-horse, or Duldul, his mule.
Your actions mean nothing, the sex and war that you do.
You're holding part of your pants and prancing around,
Dun-da-dun, dun-da-dun.
Don't wait till you die to see this.
Recognize that your imagination and your thinking
and your sense-perception are reed canes
that children cut and pretend are horsies.
The Knowing of mystic Lovers is different.
The empirical, sensory, sciences
are like a donkey loaded with books,
or like the makeup woman's makeup.
It washes off.
But if you lift the baggage rightly, it will give you joy.
Don't carry your knowledge-load for some selfish reason.
Deny your desires and willfulness,
and a real mount may appear under you.
Don't be satisfied with the name of HU,
with just words about it.
Experience that breathing.
From books and words come fantasy,
and sometimes, from fantasy, comes union.
- Rumi, Mathnawi I: 3426-3454, version by Coleman Barks
from The Essential Rumi, posted to Sunlight
The Isa Upanishad - First Verse
All is perfect, so perfectly perfect!
Whatever being lives, moves
And breathes on Earth
At every level from atom
To galaxy is absolutely perfect in its place
Precise and choreographed,
Because "That" flows from the Glory of God,
The Lord,
The Self,
Consciousness,
The Source,
Awareness, Peace and Love,
And is therefore perfect.
When you have surrendered your ego
To "That"
You will find true happiness.
Never ever envy the place of
Any other man or woman.
- A freeverse transcreation by Alan Jacobs from The Principal
Upanishads
Happy endings depend on where you stop the story.
- Orson Wells
So, the next time you are "there" - in the Great Joy,
stop it! and come and dance with me.
-dg, posted to DailyDharma
The God Who Only Knows Four Words
Every
Child
Has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don'ts,
Not the God who ever does
Anything weird,
But the God who knows only four words.
And keeps repeating them, saying
"Come Dance with Me."
Come
Dance
- Hafiz, from The Gift - Translations by Daniel Ladinsky,
posted to AlongTheWay