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Sunday, November 5


MICHAEL READ

Welcome to this NDS saloon! Wander in from time to time and have
a cup of 100 proof Dammitall. There are many willing to pour you
a generous cup of the stuff.

As to your 'war':

That was a war? Ha! Maybe a minor practice skirmish off in some
little corner somewhere. Not much to it really. Stick around and
you may get to be part of some truly 'fierce' digital battles.
:-))

Anyway, it was Dear Harsha-ji who brought attention to it.

Should you decide to stick around and become aquainted here you
will find these salooners (salon to saloon) to be quite an
eclectic lot.


We have a good mix of approaches.

We have worshippers
And thinkers
And thinking worshippers

We have talkers
And walkers
And walking talkers

We have ranters
And ravers
And ranting ravers

We have gentle beings
And fierce beings
And beings genlty fierce/fiercly gentle

We have many sages
And many stages
And stages of sages from many ages

Our moderator is immoderate
Open and considerate
Gentle and contemplate

Yes, we have much here to stimulate, inspire and aid in
opening the heart. Like life in general we participate in a
heady brew, a simmering stew rich with flavor offering much to
savor.

Again, welcome, Ivan. Bring your sense of humor, your
willingness for self examination, your thoughts, your mind, and
most of all your heart. If the Dammitall becomes too sweet or
too bitter, spit it out and ask for a refill. The drinks are
always on the house.

And don't fuck around with the 4,000,000 year old entity or the
only truly awake being in the entire universe or Mu. ;-))
They'll only ask you to join them in laughter!


HAHAHAH and HOHOHO!

Peace - Michael

________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

CHRISTIANA

Dear Gene..

After several years of listening to you, and more significantly,
aligning with the resonance (which arises here to entrain upon
through how your words are received) I am endlessly grateful for
the rudder you provide.

Again and again, this body-mind slips into the vagaries of the
"world dream". Yet the seductive limb calling me to climb out
upon, is now much more clearly seen for what it is .. an attempt
at position.

I have extracted from your post to Gary these (below) points
from your post. I am particularly moved by the reference to the
world dream occupying space; and to surrender. Through you, I
have learned to "slip out of the storyline". This has an element
of attending the space around the identified structures. Yet
what also seems to be so, is that by not attending the patterned
structures, there is less of an experience of "I". Just
spaciousness in living heartbeat.

You speak from what calls me/us forth. In the space of this
landscape here, there is now a living "Gene Poole (aka
Christiana) world-dream bull detector". Perhaps, it should even
be activated by this post. But.. before I eradicate the
thought.. here's a grateful hug.

Christiana

Gene to Gary:

1) We are in need of an open space of sharing, in which not only
differences, but also similarities may be explored. From my own
POV, this is essential.

2) ... we allow the greater system to instill its priorities and
imperatives into our individual selves. Greater system wants
conscious, coherent awareness 'of itself' by us. And it wants to
be able to manifest itself as us; as any one of us or as all of
us.

3) The world-dream occupies the space of sharing, much as does
identity occupy the personal dream. In both cases, eviction of
dream-contents is unlikely to be performed on the basis of any
procedure

which is allowed to be described in the terminologies of the
world-dream.

4) The world-dream and the contents of the personal dream
disincorporate if no reference is made to them.

5) This means that the individual suspends reaction, entertains
no agenda, and does not compare things one to another. In this
case, there is no strategy. It must be understood that there is
no expectation and no waiting.

6) There seem to be few who understand the 'way of surrender'.
This 'way' is to surrender to the unknown, not to any
identifiable thing.

7) The greater system is what is always unknown;
self-realization allows knowing self as the greater system,
_without identification.

8) It is surrender to what is always unknown, which creates the
space for the greater system to be manifest to awareness. What
manifests is awareness; it is when awareness recognizes
awareness, that self may be known.

_______________________________________________________________________

GARY MERRILL

Following on from discussions on 'not knowing', it suffices to
further say that in the spirit of dialogue it is important not
to come to any conclusion, but to leave space for what lies
beyond the known.

Thought would like to come to a conclusion, to think it knows
the answer, so as to have certainty, psychological security,
which is then only a belief even though it is of course imagined
true. So I wonder if thought can capture truth. Or is truth
always beyond thought?

Knowing the limitations of thought will free us from them
perhaps

(Knowing in the sense of seeing/realising not knowledge about,
of course)

-----------------

ANDREW MACNAB

I come to conclusions all the time, over and over. From which I
conclude that there is no conclusion to conclusion, a conclusion
which itself is open to subversion. ;-)

__________________________________________________________________

"I may, I suppose, regard myself, or pass for being, a
relatively successful man. People occasionlly stare at me in the
street. That's fame. I can fairly earn enough money to qualify
for admission to high society. That's success. Furnished with
money a a little fame. even the elderly, if they care to, may
partake of trendy diversions. That's pleasure. It might happen
once in a while that something I wrote or said was sufficiently
heeded for me to persuade myself that it represents a serious
impact on our time. That' fulfillment. And yet I say to you, and
I beg you to believe me, multiply these tiny triumphs by
million, add them all together, and they are nothing, less than
nothing, measured against one draft of the living water that
Jesus Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespecitve of
who and what they are." -Malcolm Muggeridge submitted by White
Wolfe

__________________________________________________________________

MOLLER

Based on my own experience allow me the following.

Non-duality is not created and sustained by thought. It may
include thought when thought is present, but is based as an
unfathomable, centreless sense of being, inherently not
interested in objectifying itself as verbal definition and
description. Not having its source in thought, no amount of
thinking can reveal the truth of the non-fragmented disposition
we refer to as non-duality.

We can say then that any thought we may believe we hold 'about'
non-duality is of necessity an illusion. Such a thought is
created and sustained by thought itself, which we have seen to
be not the thing itself.

So whether we think about non-duality or not, or whether we
believe that our thinking about non-duality has any reference
whatsoever with the actual living reality of centreless being,
is totally besides the point. It stands 'besides the point' as
something categorically different to the genuine article.
Thought is about, and 'about' is not the living reality of the
thing itself.

This realisation, and by realisation I do not mean any form of
mental clarity, intellectual argument, thought-created
certainty, but rather the revelation as living reality, is not
generally our disposition when we start out on the path of
self-enquiry. We start out as thought constructs called 'I',
conditioning, psychological problems and complexities,
unresolved emotional issues, fear and so on. In other words we
start out as seekers for freedom from our perceived problems. If
we were all happy, fulfilled human be-ings, would we feel the
need to enter into this absurdity called the spiritual path? We
won't, because the path itself is a measure of our unhappiness
and insanity. The free, sane person has no need for such
absurdities as sitting quietly for hours practicing meditation,
counting his breath, trying to become quiet, relax out of
contracted states of emotion and thought, or try to appear
clever by writing about all the highest truths obtained from
books and scriptures.

So it is perfectly clear to me, and this much my practice has
revealed to me, that despite all the very clever arguments my
thinking could conjure up over the years relating to concepts of
wholeness and the obvious non-dual quality of experience and so
on, behind even these most clear and insightful thoughts, lurked
the separate one. All these thoughts appeared to 'me'. So
although profoundly clear about all the arguments presented by
my own enquiry and intellectual endeavour (including deep
insights during profoundly quiet times of meditative practice)
about the non-dual 'nature' of myself, and everything else, over
time it became clear to me that I was still separate and
unwhole. The most reasonable deduction that could be made from
this was that perhaps I was using the wrong instrument to reveal
the wholeness to me.

It became clear to me that thought can ask questions it simply
cannot answer. Also it can make statements about things it has
absolutely no ability to get 'in touch' with. Or to become one
with. My thoughts about non-duality were as empty as the
religious mind's thoughts about metaphysical projections. It
became clear then that although I could reasonably pin down a
great many (if not all) of my problems to thought, thought
itself had no ability to bring the answers which would be living
reality rather than just another opposite thought pojected to
counter the presumed 'cause' of the original problem.

This was a watershed realisation in my own practice. When it
became clear that thought cannot answer the problems of'I'
consciousness, and other such disturbances in the field of
consciousness it has created. Any attempt by thought to bring
freedom from these many disturbing aspects of being, was now
seen as more of the same thing. Thought cannot wash away
thought. It can only try to suppress it with some presumed
'higher thought', or counter a fondly held argument with some
more refined argument. But in either case thought is still the
active principle, and cannot relieve itself of itself by itself.
And as it is with this thought with which we are so profoundly
identified, no freedom is possible within thought.

But this is a profound insight. It has to reveal itself through
meticulous introspection. So that it does not just become again
the truth of another being taken by thought and projected as a
liberating principle or delusiory opposite. In this way,( Dan),
the wheel has to be re-invented each one for h/herself. There
are as many paths as there are practitioners or enquirers. But
what has to be revealed as a fundamental interim truth and
reality by such enquiry, is that thought is not the thing. The
talk about non-duality, the thinking about non-duality is false.
Not because the thinking process itself is false, but because
thought can only project its own version (mental creation) of
these matters. And it becomes a double lie if we propagate these
illusiory, conceptually created, projections as having anything
whatsoever to do with the living reality of the non-fragmented
being. This is what I have once described in a post on
HarshaSatsangh as the Advaitist's dream.

And because very few know the way from here, partially because
the latter-day Advaitist guru's proclaim that the thought IS the
thing, and so the idea ABOUT the non-dual state IS the thing
itself, and so we are ALREADY 'THERE' so no work needs to be
done, the enquiry has become stultified and this stultification
has taken on the epidemic proportions so-called Western Advaita
is suffering, unknowingly, from. This dream has now become
reality. And this dream is being repeated, and has now become
'conventional wisdom' or ' perfectly obvious' to all.

It is only obvious as a thought. Nothing else. Not unlike the
existence of god being obvious to the religious mentality. There
is absolutely nothing obvious about non-duality or non-doing. It
is just thought presenting clever arguments to itself, and then
believes its own arguments to be the thing itself, or ralating
to the thing itself.

Ignorance is nothing other than thought mistaking its own
creations for reality. It is what keeps the dream of
subjectivity alive. Because despite all the procrastinations
form all the pseudo-advaitists on these lists, theytill suffer
the very same thing they are pretending to one another to have
left behind somewhere in the dungeons of their own minds.
Nothing has been left behind. The 'I' is still there, with each
and every futile explanation towards this conceptually created
madness called non-dualism. It is the very essense of dualism.

Once this problem of the monkey chasing its own tail has been
seen as the very principle of delusion, we may start to enquire
whether there may be something that could be done, which does
not perpetuate the very thing we are trying to get away from.
Before that, any proposition that there is no-where to go,
nothing to do, no-doer from the start, and so on, is always,
already part of the fragmented being's desparate attempt at
pretending it is not real, and does not exist. But both its
pretence and its existence remain in tact as its existence. Mind
on mind. Concept on concept. Delusion on delusion.

The dream continues unabated. And with it, human suffering.

Love, Moller.

------------------------

WHITE WOLFE

Master Moller:
white wolfe is not particularly advaitist nor is he
non-advaitist...he is a mystic who happens to also, at present,
practice Zen and Catholicism. a more accurate discription might
be to say that i am a dharma-bum....

i am a new visitor to cyberspace chat, but much of what i see
there reminds me of what i have always referred to as
philosophical non-dualism. talk, as in higher education, is what
the experience/medium is about. living in a state of non-duality
(enlightment, individuation, awakeness, salvation, grace, love -
pick your symbol) is no longer merely about talk for me, but an
existential experience of continuous and uninterupted love and
unity with all creation regardless of where my Spirit (Mystic
Mind and Sacred Heart) or subtler intuition and/or grosser
senses wander (body, mind and soul are all empty of reality for
me). in the beginning i needed many hours of meditation and/or
contemplative prayer just to be still for a few minutes (my
fragile ego was dependant on alcohol and sex for a sense of
idenity). now i need just a few minutes to be still for hours.
for me, the ability to talk to the talk was the first stumbling
step toward higher concsciousness and not a place of arrival,
but rather a mere place to pass through... it took me years to
get beyond the conceit that talk was enlightenment. so now, i
enjoy the talk as talk and enter into it freely. those who seem
to be behind me i gently nug my nose and suggest that there is
more to the chase while i chase the scent of those my nose tells
me are upwind and still before me on this magic journey...

______________________________________________________________________

Now for a description of the seven stages of life put forth by
Adi Da. I quote:

"In the first three stages of life, the gross body-mind complex
is developed and coordinated. First the gross physical is
developed, then the emotional-sexual functions are developed and
coordinated with the gross physical, and, finally, the mental
functions and the function of the will are developed and
coordinated with the emotional-sexual and gross physical
functions. Optimally, all of this is nurtured, guided and one in
the context of love, trust, and surrender in relation to the
Living Divine Person or Reality.

"In the fourth stage of life, this now complex psycho-physical
being is surrendered to the beyond itself, to and into the
Divine Person or Condition of Being that pervades it and the
total world. This surrender is done to the point of
self-transcending devotional union with the Divine Person or
Reality in occasions of Love-Bliss that involve and
simultaneously transcend the body-mind (and, in due course, such
devotional union becomes, by Grace, devotional union with the
Spiritual Presence or Spirit-Current of Being, of the Divine
Person or Reality).

"In the fifth stage of life, this process is continued, but the
plane of conditional self-awareness ascends, to become
dominantly subtle (or psychic), rather than gross (or merely
physical), and the Realization of union involves experiences of
ascended attention that eventually go beyond physical references
and, at last, even beyond mental references.

"In the sixth stage of life, the body-mind is simply released
into the Spirit-Current, and attention (which is the root, or
base, of the mind) is inverted, away from the gross and subtle
states and objects of the body-mind, and toward its own Root,
even the ultimate Root of the ego-self, which is the
Witness-Consciousness (when attention is active), and which is
also, ultimately, simple Consciousness (or Consciousness itself,
prior to objects and separate self-definition). The final result
of this is conditional Realization of the Transcendental and
inherently Spiritual, Self-Condition (or the intuition of
Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Transcendental Being via the
exclusive self-essence, strategically dissociated from all
objects.)

"In the seventh stage of life, there is Native Identification
with Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Transcendental (and
necessarily Divine) Being, the ultimate identity of all beings
(or subjects) and the ultimate Condition of all conditions (or
objects). This Native Identification (or Divine Self-Abiding) is
directly Realized, entirely apart from any dissociative act of
inversion. And, while so Abiding, if any conditions arise, or if
any states of body-mind arise, they are simply (Divinely)
recognized in the Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Condition of
Being (as transparent, or merely apparent, unnecessary, and
non-binding, modifications of Itself). Such is Sahaj Samadhi,
and it is inherently Free of any apparent implications,
limitations, or binding power of phenomenal conditions. If no
conditions arise to the notice, there is simply the
Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Condition of Transcendental, and
inherently Spiritual, Divine Being. Such is Nirvana, or the
Absolute Realization of Brahman, or the Inherently Most Perfect
Realization of That about Which nothing sufficient can be said
(and there is not Anyone, Anything, or Anywhere beyond It to be
Realized)."

_____________________________________________________________________________

DAN BERKOW

When all words can be reversed,
then the Unknown is knowing itself.

When all actions are one action,
and that action has no place
to occur, Unknown knowingness is.

This When is now.

Many body-minds walk about in a daze,
eyes blurred from the drunkenness
of concepts, including feelings
and memories.

In an instant, the body-mind entity is undone.

Yet the body-mind continues to walk and talk.

And who is there to judge its
walking, talking, coming and going?

____________________________________________________________

MARK OTTER
Hi Folks,

When I was out in Santa Fe doing more of the Grof Transpersonal
Training (holotropic breathwork), I bought a lovely little book
of teachings by Achaan Chah, Jack Kornfield's teacher. Here is
one of the teachings I like:

Know Yourself - Know Others

Know your own mind and body, and you will know others' as well.
One's facial expressions, speech, gestures, actions, all stem
from one's state of mind. A Buddha, an enlightened being, can
read these because he has experienced and seen with wisdom the
states of mind that underlie them, just as wise older people,
having passed through childhood, can understand the ways of
children. This self-knowledge differs from memory. An old person
can be clear inside but fuzzy in regard to external things. Book
learning may be very difficult for him, he forgets names and
faces, and so on. Maybe he knows very well that he wants a
basin, but because of the weakness of his memory, he may ask for
a glass instead. If you see states rising and falling in the
mind and do not cling to the process, letting go of both
happiness and suffering, mental rebirths become shorter and
shorter. Letting go, you can even fall into hell states without
too much disturbance, because you know the impermanence of them.
Through right practice, you allow your karma to wear itself out.
Knowing how things arise and pass away, you can just be aware
and let them run their course. It is like having two trees: if
you fertilize and water one and do not take care of the other,
there is no question which one will grow and which one will die.

So (mark again), for me it appears that just relaxing and
allowing life to happen lets it wind down and clarity arises. I
certainly notice that happening in the breathwork. Yesterday, at
a workshop, I felt I could just allow whatever energy that
wanted to arise to arise and burn itself out. This can happen
for the whole room now. Demon energies come up, and they go to
ground through my willingness to just be with them. People in
the room talk in tongues and I can understand it. In a workshop
a couple of weeks ago, I heard the demons asking us to teach
them how to love. It seems to me all to be that way. It's all
estranged energy wanting to love again. So practicing not
clinging, imagining a hollow channel for difficult energies to
pass through to completion seems to me to be worth practicing. I
think Achaan Chah is recommending watering and fertilizing our
willingness to just let it all be, and not watering our
resistance. This child (me) stopped nagging his parents for
candy not because he was successful in stifling that energy but
because when it had expressed itself enough, it was finished and
could transform into something else (which of course I have been
trying to stifle unsuccessfully for years. - don't get me wrong
- this is ongoing practice for me.)

_______________________________________________________________________

A ZEN STORY

by Camden Benares, The Count of Five, Headmaster, Camp Meeker
Cabal

A serious young man found the conflicts of mid 20th Century
America confusing. He went to many people seeking a way of
resolving within himself the discords that troubled him, but he
remained troubled.

One night in a coffee house, a self-ordained Zen Master said to
him, "go to the dilapidated mansion you will find at this
address which I have written down for you. Do not speak to those
who live there; you must remain silent until the moon rises
tomorrow night. Go to the large room on the right of the main
hallway, sit in the lotus position on top of the rubble in the
northeast corner, face the corner, and meditate."

He did just as the Zen Master instructed. His meditation was
frequently interrupted by worries. He worried whether or not the
rest of the plumbing fixtures would fall from the second floor
bathroom to join the pipes and other trash he was sitting on. He
worried how would he know when the moon rose on the next night.
He worried about what the people who walked through the room
said about him.

His worrying and meditation were disturbed when, as if in a test
of his faith, ordure fell from the second floor onto him. At
that time two people walked into the room.

The first asked the second who the man was sitting there was.
The second replied: "Some say he is a holy man. Others say he is
a shithead."

Hearing this, the man was enlightened.

_________________________________________________________________________

SHELLY BORG

Dear friends,I have recieved such great response from my last
post(not really)that I have come to share with you once again, a
few more semantic principles to help the Non Duality Saloon
function more smoothly.

1- A thing affirmed is it's own oppisite.
2-All verbal truths are partial.
3-All generalizations are false, even this one.
4- Regarding opinions, they are either ALL TRUE,
or NONE of them are true,
or BOTH,
or NEITHER,
or ALL FOUR.
Please do not accuse me of plagiarism,I make no claim to
originality. Shanti Snanti Shanti.
Borgananda says- Question Reality!

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