In Monday's issue Gloria noted the passing of Lou
Reed. In this issue we remind you of the recent passings of Rick
Linchitz and Doris Lessing.
Before that I want to remind you that Nonduality
Network Talk Radio airs Wednesday from 12:30 - 1:30pm. You may
listen athttp://ckdu.ca.
Word is that Highlights editor Dustin LindenSmith
will be joining me in the studio and we'll be talking about all
kinds of interesting things.
This will be the fund raiser show for the radio
station itself, not for our specific show. CKDU in Halifax, Nova
Scotia, "is mandated to act as an alternative to public (CBC) and
commercial radio stations. We offer programming that can not be
found elsewhere on the airwaves in Halifax."
If you want to make a pledge to the show the phone
number is 902-49-happy. Otherwise just tune in and see what
trouble me and Dustin get into.
This is the last email Rick Linchitz sent to some
German friends before he died:
"Not much to tell. We're all living and dying. Life
becoming more focused. "Future" more clearly dries up and "plans"
disappear. Bodily functions, especially breathing, major focus. As
always, nothing special. Just life being lived."
"Lot's of pain and shortness of breath, but also
deep peace. What appears to be transformation, is also the eternal
peace of the unchanging oneness who we are."
~ ~ ~
Rick's book is No You and No Me: The Loving
Awareness in Which all Arises:
Doris May Lessing CH (née Tayler; 22 October 1919 –
17 November 2013) was a British novelist, poet, playwright,
librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include
The Grass is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels
collectively called Children of Violence (1952–69), The Golden
Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels
collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).
Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in
Literature. In awarding the Prize the Swedish Academy described
her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with
scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided
civilisation to scrutiny".[1] Lessing was the eleventh woman and
the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in
Literature.[2][3][4] In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize
for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The
Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British
writers since 1945".[5]
On Sunday, her publisher HarperCollins released an
announcement about her death, and biographer Michael Holroyd
described her legacy, as The Guardian reported:
He said: “Her themes have been universal and
international. They ranged from the problems of post-colonial
Africa to the politics of nuclear power, the emergence of a new
woman’s voice and the spiritual dimensions of 20th-century
civilisation. Few writers have as broad a range of subject and
sympathy.
“She is one of those rare writers whose work crosses
frontiers, and her impressively large output constitutes a
chronicle of our time. She has enlarged the territory both of the
novel and of our consciousness.”
Nick Pearson, her editor at HarperCollins/4th
Estate, said : “I adored her.”
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Doris Lessing is the highest profile modern novelist
who has followed the Sufi path. In an essay on Idries Shah,
she explained its attraction: "Sufi truth is at the core
of every religion, its heart, and religions are only the
outward vestments of an inner reality"
Giving the Dervish a Whirl' by Peter Culshaw. The
Guardian Magazine 1st Dec 2001.
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Having read about the religions of the world after
completing The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing perceived remarkable
affinity among these religions. As she writes: "[A]ll religions
and types of mysticism say the same thing in different words: that
it is possible for anyone to transcend the little cage which is
how some people experience ordinary life, in an effort to come
nearer to God, or Allah, or the Almighty, or The Otherthat Power
greater than ourselves Who is not to be made property of any
religion, or sect, or arrangement of words"
Doris Lessing asserts, "But it is my belief that it
is always the individual, in the long run, who will set the tone,
provide the real development of society. ... Looking back, I see
what a great influence an individual may have, even an apparently
obscure person, living a small, quiet life. It is individuals who
change societies, give birth to ideas, who standing against the
tides of opinion, change them. ... Everything that has ever
happened to me has taught me to value the individual, the person
who cultivates and preserves his or her own way of thinking, who
stands out against group thinking, group pressures."
A number of feminist women have written about the
importance of mindful clarity. The wandering that Mary Daly
chronicles requires immense awareness and self-knowledge (1985, xii,
89). Doris Lessing, herself influenced by the meditative traditions of
Sufism, makes awareness the starting point of Martha Quest's
spiritual odyssey in The Four Gated City. Martha learns how to make
herself "alive and light and aware" (37) she knows the advantages,
walking in the London rain, of having "her head cool, watchful,
alert" (38). She knows too the sense of "a quiet, empty space, behind
which stood an observing presence." Here also mindfulness is
described in terms of mental characteristics other than knowledge. But
from a Buddhist perspective there is little in the way of an
epistemological clarification of what this is or how it is
cultivated.
Mindfulness is physically centering. Quieting the
processes of distraction stills the breath and soothes the body.
Indeed, acknowledging the intimate relationship between
bodily and emotional or cognitive experience is vital to many meditative
traditions. Physical and mental processes are not two halves of
a whole, but two avenues of access into the fully integrated complex
in which they participate. Subjective shifts, in this view, always
involve the entire person. Calming, for example, is associated
with a variety of pleasurable physical sensations, from feeling one's
body as preternaturally soft or light, to--far more rarely
but also more famously--intense sexual pleasure.
Mindfulness, says Buddhaghosa, reveals mind and body
as functions in constant communication, always shaping and
responding to the other "like a drum and the sound of a drum" (1976, 690).
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remembering doris lessing...
Mon Nov 18, 2013 7:26 pm (PST) . Posted by: "Yosy" in Nonduality Salon:
:) rest in peace, sister
*************** a true teacher takes what you do not have and gives you what is always yours.
this is why the sage does his work and slips away unperceived.
real masters are like thieves: only the ones caught are known. the best remain hidden*
yet their blessed presence though unrecognized continuously sustains the world. ***************