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Marcia told:

...the other morning I was sitting and working with
breathing. On the in breath I was sensing my body from the
inside with I and on the out breath feeling with AM. Both
of my daughters did something which both interrupted my
meditation and made "me" very angry. What I noticed was if
I chose to continue I had much more energy in both the
sensing and the feeling.

Jan responded:

Without your daughters you probably wouldn't have noticed.
They are guardian angels, testing your progress :) Watching
the breath can become something like a second nature, very
much like knitting or driving and then the awareness of
energy will be continuous. It will be possible to arrest
the arising anger at its source, without suppressing
anything. But perhaps you experienced that already...

___________________________________________________________________

Bruce enlightened us:

Don't worry about what K and Poonjaji say, what do you see?
What can be observed of the gaps between thoughts?

A relatively recent discovery of mine on this issue is at
the following URL:

http://www.users.uniserve.com/~samuel/brucmrg4.htm#concurrency

Don't take my word for it either!


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from Harsha:

...you are on the right track, the only track there is,
which leads to only where you are, and that is total and
absolute independence and self-reliance. Having observed
the spiritual scene carefully over a long time, I am of the
view that many well known teachers are themselves wrestling
with their own life issues and suffering from serious
psychological problems and are incapable of offering any
real help to anyone including themselves. Hey, that's
life. See where you find peace, and what calms your mind.
If a teacher or a teaching does that, it is a good start.
If a teacher further agitates you, creates fear and
confusion, it might be healthy to get off that train. Don't
allow a teacher's confusion and fears to become your own.
In any state of knowing or unknowing, Know yourself always
to be clear and pure, both the laughter and delight of
existence and the total emptiness of non-existence. The
serenity of awareness that permeates all chaos and
transcends it, is you. There is no other place to Be but
Here.
Here is Everywhere.

_________________________________________________________________


Tim challenged us:

Help... having $18,000 in expendable income in the bank
seems to have destroyed the nondual perspective here. It is
almost impossible to remain inwardly directed, to remain
with the inner questioning that is so necessary. I find
myself feeling "of" the world again, rather than "in the
world, but not of it." The "root of all evil" seems to have
me in its grasp.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I know intellectually
that "you can't take it with you," and that eventually there
is going to be suffering (and probably a lot of it), but
intellectual understanding isn't enough. Should I "force
myself" back to Presence, or let things take their natural
course?
````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
And here are some of the edited responses:

Aleks offered:

greetings my brother, tim! a few bucks in the bank can be a
strange and scary thing-- especially for those of us who've
known "down and out" and learned to thrive with very
little. i bought a little manufactured home with my "chunk
of change" so i needn't pay rent-- just a small fee for the
land.

David Hodges said:

Can you ask yourself exactly is it about the $18,000 in the
bank that makes your previous inner directed, nonDual state
impossible?
Is it fantasies of how to spend it?
Is it plans to invest it and make it grow?
Is it worry about losing it?
Whatever it is, can you look at that as an energy pulling
you away from yourself?
And if you can do that can you then circle around the energy
and see it as a projection of something inside you?
And then can you skillfully and patiently reclaim the
energy, can you reclaim it from the projection onto the
money, back to your own self?

In other words, use the very energy of what is destroying
your nonDual state as a means to deepen and extend that
state, by reclaiming another area of your dream. If you can
do this, then you will thank the money alot for giving you
such a great gift - much greater than anything you could
have bought with it!

Andrew's idea:

don't worry about it, it needn't be a cloud in the blue
sky. Money is power in the temporal ideational world, it's
nice to have a little on hand.
A little cushion to sit on. :-)
The ground can be hard and cold, as you know.

Jan thundered forth:

Isn't this a worthwhile experience, finding out that
perspectives are always conditioned? Get rid of
perspectives. The intellectual side of things is a poor
substitute for "the real thing", like eating a mango made
out of wax instead of a juicy one, freshly picked from the
tree. So this episode could bring compassion and
understanding for those, caught in the maze of conceptual
thinking and the chase after the whims of the mind that
neither will end by itself nor will convey lasting happiness
when the whims are fulfilled.
Compassion too for our furry friends who are rather helpless
in "cement city". Shelter, food and clothing are the basic
requirements for humans to keep physically alive and even
today many are dying from hunger or diseases that easily
could have been prevented.

One cannot force anything. This (the idea forcing is
possible) is just part of the illusion (taking things for
what they are not). Some are able to understand immediately
whereas others need to experience it first. The last is
more convincing. But if Presence can get lost just because
of an inheritance, one might ask if that was Presence at
all.. Do you remember having asked once, where to find an
Ashram for "free"? Now you have the money to go there -
that is if you think it could further progress and eliminate
doubts. On the other hand, you could invest in gear to
become a fully self-sufficient programmer.

Phil revealed:

If I had 18 grand I would pack my knapsack and get on a slow
boat to India. There I would hang out with sadhus and gurus
and such, and visit all the shrines. Go to Nepal and Bali
when finished with India. If there was any money left after
that, I'd spend it all in Hawaii and have only enough to get
me home to the mainland.

Petros braved:

A trip to India or Southeast Asia as someone mentioned is a
superb idea. You can travel very cheaply down there, and
live at ashrams in India for almost nothing. (For instance,
cheap hotels in India are about $5-10 a night. You could
live a month in India for less than a thousand bucks.) It
was very spiritually uplifting for me when I went to India
and Sri Lanka in '98, and with your interest in nonduality
you would get a lot out of it. It's a scary and eye-opening
experience if you've never been to the third world before.

Kristie gifted:

Let things take their natural course! Presence cannot be
lost; it can be hidden, but not lost. Do what you want with
your money; in that way you will learn best what it is you
really want...it may be what you have done, it may not. No
need to fear, the worst is you will blow it all, and be
right back where you started before...it's just a way
station on the journey, not a destination. Be wise and
prudent, or be frivolous, or have fun, or help people (if
you're handing out money I need a car so I can go back to
school...) or help furry friends, or invest it, or burn it,
it doesn't matter....whatever you do, you will
learn....listen to your little voice(s); money is just green
energy....deploy it in whatever way feels natural or good.
If no way feels natural or good, wait, be patient, then you
will know, what will be most beneficial to you.



_____________________________________________________________________


Silence can not be perceived, experienced, because silence
is the ever-receding background of all manifestation and
existence. When thought thunders, it is in silence that it
does!! When a super-nova star explodes with trillions
megatons of energy, it is in silence that it does! Silence
can not be "disturbed" by mere thoughts.....for silence is
our real nature. This would both guarantee an independent
income, some responsibility and the possibility to practice
while at work. For a "jnani yogi proper" working, getting
inheritances, benefiting furry friends or tying up shoelaces
shouldn't make a difference regarding "Presence".

----Ivan


___________________________________________________________________


Gene graced us:


A few thoughts on UGK

My own readings of UG... have been productive. Perhaps
because, for some reason, I was inspired to look at UG
through the lens of NLP/NeuroLinguistic Programming.

UG's manner of speaking... is appropriate for each
encounter that is recorded. I can only trust the
transcriber, in assuming this.

My own take is that it is futile to attempt to find or
discover 'truth'... if that 'truth' is stated and defined in
such a way that is relevant to other speech. "Truth is
found only in language" is a true statement... yet, all
language is based upon other language. If this seems to
state that 'truth' is always 'relative truth', which it
does, then it is fair to say that there is no 'absolute
truth' by which to then by comparison, create the catagory
of 'relative truth'. If then, there is neither relative nor
absolute 'truth', perhaps a better word than 'truth' can be
found. This is, in my opinion, what UG is actually doing,
and he does it with skill which far surpasses any living
'master' of NLP.

UGK is 'about disabusement'; he is 'taking away falsity' and
leaving _nothing_ in it's place.

I get a good belly-laugh when I hear others stating opinions
about UG and his ways, his stories of his 'calamity', his
perfect and unselfconscious 'acting-job', his incredible
mirroring to others, his unconcern for the sacred cows of
others so-called 'beliefs'. UG is living in a state of
perpetual mortification, and he knows it. He knows that he
has 'reverted' to the 'essential animal' that is the human
Being, what always is there, beneath the layers of
sophistications which denotes the sociallized human
herd-monad-unit.

When we get right 'down to it', UG is pointing at himself as
an example that cannot be duplicated, _for the reason_ that
'we all are already that'. UG does not mind being blamed for
speaking in ways that are tailored to perfectly mirror each
supplicant. His non-imaginings are so pithy, as to ignite
the imagination of the one he is speaking to; it is these
imagined things that he non-imagines right back to the
nothingness from which they sprang in first place. UG is
slaughtering nothing but _superstition_.

UG is tempting us to realize something so basic, so simple,
that it "sinks beneath your wisdom like a stone", to quote
the song. What this simple realization is, is that nothing
can really stand for anything else. Analogy is analogy,
metaphor is metaphor. Language is 'simply' a vast catalogue
of symbolic representations; yet, humans (seekers, or
suckers as UG would perhaps say) sift through this vast
catalogue of sybolic representations and then are fond of
saying that 'this is truth' and 'this is false'. To take
away both truth and falsity is the greatest gift, and UG is
one of the greatese 'spiritual garbag-men' now living. Yes,
he oft uses a bludgeon, rather than the rose-strewn scalpel,
but his blunt attacks serve to point out just how we create
a 'sacred reservation' and populate it with hypothetical
entities. UG is the living 'Ockham's Razor', deleting all
entities and leaving only awareness, unembellished. In
that, he does a great service. The fact that being with him
induces fear, wonder, and nausea, is proof of our attachment
to ways which have nothing to do with plain and essential
being. UG rips us off.

By the way, for those who wish to pursue it, there is a
great similarity to UG to be found in these books:

_The Golden Man_ by PK Dick, in the story 'The Golden Man'.
In this short story, the 'Golden man' only _does_ what UG
_speaks_. Read it and tell me if I am correct.

_The Book of the SubGenius_ by The SubGenius Foundation...
in the chapter revealing the 'Divine Immaculation' of JR
"Bob" Dobbs. It is revealed that "Bob" has a
hernia-inducing encounter with the mad space-god 'Jehova-1',
quite similar to that 'calamity' which UG refers to. This
material might be available on the WWW:

<http://www.subgenius.com/index18.html>

__________________________________________________________________


Gloria wisdom:

...there you go some more.. figuring out names, checking it
out with..
Is this really it? Is this the "right name" for it? Who
CARES?? If this "great state" you seek could be destroyed
by one teensy puny thought, what would this be worth? Would
this be liberation?? How free would you be if you needed
constantly to prevent having any thoughts? Where do such
ideas and concepts come from...?

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