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Thursday, November 22


JOHN METZGER contributes

Let us give thanks for chaos and logos and
implicate order; for dark matter, bright galaxies,
and nonlocal connections; for crystals and
continents; for Lucy's skull and Mary Leakey's
footprints in volcanic ash; for Thales' water,
Heraclitus' fire, and Pythagorean forms; for the
Indian zero, algebra, and algorithms; for the
oscillations of the Yin and the Yang; for
acupuncture, Su Sung's astronomical clock, and
Huang Tao P'i's textile technology; for Arabic
alchemists on the Old Silk Road and Ibn Sina's
Canon of Medicine; for Euclid and Newton and "God
playing dice"; for Kepler's snowflake and Kekule's
dream; for Mendel's monastery peas and the genetic
Tetragrammaton on the spiral staircase of life; for
fractals, ferns and fall foliage; for caterpillars
and cocoons; for the infant's first cry; for
Pachebel's canon; for stained glass windows,
Leeuwenhoek's microscope, and the Galileo probe;
for the World Wide Web to help us become conscious
of cosmic interconnectedness; but most of all, let
us give thanks for the twin passions which make us
fully human--the yearning to transcend the
boundaries of time and space by learning and by
loving.

Ingrid Shafer

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RASHMI

Experiencer and experienced are two sides of the
same coin. Ok. Without the thing to be experienced
there would be no experiencer. So experiencing then
would have no relevance. So, it's good as being
dead. And then what?

GLORIA LEE

What an amazing conclusion you jump to! Still, it
is a very understandable reaction that people hear
such statements as "no experiencer" and "no doer"
to be a negation of life. The truth is exactly the
opposite!

Please consider that any such analogy is intended
to merely illustrate something difficult to
understand by comparing to something easier to
understand. So let us suppose instead a living
analogy. Here is a white rabbit. The mind and
senses give you many bits of apparently separate
information, such as feels soft, looks white, it
moves, etc. However, to attempt to actually
separate the ideas will kill the rabbit! The mind
is separating and making these bits into different
ideas simply because that is what a mind does to
differentiate a rabbit from say a skunk. To really
separate them is the end of the rabbit. You can
only *imagine* to separate the white from the
softness of the fur, without actually destroying
both.

The coin analogy is the same, it illustrates the
actual inseparability in comparison to *imagined
concepts* of two things. Nonduality is "not two",
remember? Does this help any?


JAN BARENDRECHT

There never was an experiencer nor an experience.
There are but seemingly ongoing events of which the
thoughts of "experiencer and experienced" are but a
few. A nice analogy is that of a closed long tin
filled with water which is heated from below. When
cooking, bubbles form and rise from the bottom and
they will 'notice' the other bubbles, similar but
never the same. While rising, the water cools again
and the bubbles disappear - but on the scale of the
entire tin, it can be said nothing happened as no
bubble escaped from it and it contains only water.

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