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# 5121 - The Nonduality Highlights - Tuesday, December 24 - Editor: Jerry Katz
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Pay (no) Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain!
In the timeless classic “The Wiz” ( with Diana Ross as ” Dorothy” and Michael Jackson as the “Scarecrow”) we’re all familiar with the scene when Dorothy, her dog Toto and her friends the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man, finally get an audience with the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz.
Well, to claim that you’re great and powerful, you must make folks believe that you’re great and powerful. To make them believe, you need to be intimidating, awe inspiring, loud and frightening.
You need to be different. You need to stand out so others will stand up and pay attention!
You also need to hide behind a curtain, because you know this is all bluster and prestidigitation. You know it isn’t real.
You are behind the curtain. You’re also all the bluster, pomp and circumstance.
You done good! As both the audience and the actors you fell for it! Take a bow, the Oscar goes to….you, the sky, hearing, sight, dogs, the ocean, wind, daughters, moms, chocolate, babies, spiders, thoughts, pain, colors, planets, other people, everything! You did a great job playing all the parts!
Keep in mind that these things are all distractions. None of it is evil, wrong, wicked or sinful. They’re just attention grabbing forms of entertainment. So the next time you’re watching a movie or reading a book, know that you (the “reader”) is just as fake and made up as that story. The next time you’re putting gas in your car, know that whatever is happening is neither true nor false. It’s just whatever and doesn’t need to be figured out or held onto. It’s a story.
The story comes out of who you really are, which is not a story. If we want to call it something we can call it unconditional Love or Acceptance or Awareness or Whatever.
Don’t try to figure it out or go ahead and try to figure it out. Trying or not trying to figure it out is part of the story.
And that’s all fine. Don’t take it seriously. Yes, there seems to be pain, sorrow, fear, frustration, anger, sadness, etc., but Love accepts everything. And why not?
Love has no goal or purpose. You have no goal or purpose. You’re not trying to get anywhere or get anything from anyone. Nothing is being done to you.
Everything is still. There’s no movement here. There’s only safety, calmness, stillness and peace.
Don’t be afraid of what’s behind the curtain. Go ahead and pull it back. Look behind the colors, the sounds, the fears, the feelings. Look behind the words, the labels and the interpretations. Give attention to what you find there.
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Read more at www.ypifany.blogspot.ca/
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photo: Jean Klein
James Traverse writes:
Below is one of my favorite Jean Klein quotes
“It is only through silent awareness that our physical and mental nature can change. This change is completely spontaneous. If we make an effort to change we do no more than shift our attention from one level, from one thing, to another. We remain in a vicious circle. This only transfers energy from one point to another. It still leaves us oscillating between suffering and pleasure, each leading inevitably back to the other. Only living stillness, stillness without someone trying to be still, is capable of undoing the conditioning our biological, emotional and psychological nature has undergone. There is no controller, no selector, no personality making choices. In choiceless living the situation is given the freedom to unfold. You do not grasp one aspect over another for there is nobody to grasp. When you understand something and live it without being stuck to the formulation, what you have understood dissolves in your openness. In this silence change takes place of its own accord, the problem is resolved and duality ends. You are left in your glory where no one has understood and nothing has been understood.” ~ Jean Klein, I Am
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Francis
Bennett, former Trappist Monk in the Christian
Contemplative tradition, shares in the new edition ofOneTheMagazine the story of his
radical shift in perception after more than 20 years of monastic
life. What he realized deeply transformed his understanding of
Christianity and the powerful unifying message at the heart of all
the great spiritual traditions.
An excerpt from the article:
God Is in Everything and Everything Is in God
. . . I was happily living the monastic life again and trying to practice the self-abiding I had learned from Sri Ramana. It was a serene and happy time. Several years into all this, I experienced what I could only call a deep awakening that changed my whole world. This was a major shift in perception incomparable to anything I had ever previously experienced in all my years of seeking and practice. In fact, this so-called experience was not an experience at all, but was rather the simple discovery of the pure awareness in which every experience rises and sets.
At one point, right in the midst of a religious service, it was as if a bolt of lightning had struck the crown of my head and sent a strong energy current through my whole body, from head to feet. In that instant, I suddenly saw clearly that in reality, the presence of God that I had been seeking my whole life had actually always been already within me and all around me: God is in everything and everything is in God.
Why hadn’t I been able to see this before? It was so obvious. And this was not merely some kind of philosophical or theological concept. I clearly saw this and felt it with every fiber of my being.
There was a deep intuitive knowing in that instant that my own most basic sense of simple existence or beingness, the I am or the Self that Sri Ramana had taught so much about, is, in fact, always, effortlessly, eternally present here and now. There is simply no possibility of it ever not being present. And this simple sense of presence in the eternal now is nothing other than the presence of God. Simultaneously included in this split second seeing and knowing was the understanding that this eternally shining presence of I am, was and is and always will be, my own true identity.
The “story of me” fell away utterly and completely . . .
You can read the rest of Francis’ story at www.onethemagazine.com, a quarterly online subscription magazine bringing the good news of awakening from around the world.