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Thursday, January 3



LOBSTER
from HarshaSatsangh

Bhagavan looked at me with eyes filled with compassion and
said: 'Listen, the Heart on the right side of the chest is
the spiritual centre where the Lord dwells. Keep your
attention fixed on this Heart. This is the best form of
meditation.'

I then asked him whether there was any particular posture
which is conducive to meditation. He replied: 'Any posture is
all right. The important thing is to keep the attention fixed
on the Heart.'

:-)

Dear Friends,

This is exactly correct and complete. Breath from the heart,
feel from the heart. Relax in the Heart. Be centered from and
in the Heart . . . and do it EASILY

Easily Lobster

_________________________________________________________________________

GREG GOODE AND GLORIA LEE
from NoDoer list

One of the best depictions I've ever seen was in a Chinese
film, _LIFE ON A STRING_. A man was born blind, and for many
years studied the banjo with his teacher. Before the teacher
died, one of the last things he told the blind youth was that
when he played the banjo enough to break 1000 strings, he
would be able to see. So he travelled the countryside,
playing for villages and became sort of a psychic seer as he
got older and broke more and more strings in the course of
playing. There is great dramatic tension around the time of
the 100th string. And "seeing" is played with in the film,
both as ocular vision and also as enlightenment.

The film's end brought tears of sweetness and joy to my eyes!
I highly recommend it!

There's also Keanu Reeves' LITTLE BUDDHA but LIFE ON A STRING
is much better!

Love,

--Greg

Wow, I hope to find that movie, thanks Greg. I found a
description of one of those Japanese "worlds of meaning"
evoked by one word, like they do in haikus. This is from Alan
Watts, embedded within a huge talk he gave on emptiness. With
the untranslatable word yugen, you see how its suggested best
by images.

Somehow, you know, it's so well-said that it's not so bad
after all. The poet has got the intuition that things are
always running out, that things are always disappearing, has
some hidden marvel in it. I was discussing with someone
during the lunch intermission, the Japanese have a word
_yugen_, which has no English equivalent whatsoever. Yugen is
in a way digging change. It's described poetically, you have
the feeling of yugen when you see out in the distant water
some ships hidden behind a far-off island. You have the
feeling of yugen when you watch wild geese suddenly seen and
then lost in the clouds. You have the feeling of yugen when
you look across Mt Tamapeis, and you've never been to the
other side, and you see the sky beyond. You don't go over
there to look and see what's on the other side, that wouldn't
be yugen. You let the other side be the other side, and it
invokes something in your imagination, but you don't attempt
to define it to pin it down. Yugen. So in the same way, the
coming and going of things in the world is marvelous. They
go. Where do they go? Don't answer, because that would spoil
the mystery. They vanish into the mystery. But if you try to
persue them, you destroy yugen. That's a very curious thing,
but that idea of yugen, which in Chinese characters means, as
it were, kind of 'the deep mystery of the valley.' There's a
poem in Chinese which says 'The wind drops, but the petals
keep falling. The bird calls, and the mountain becomes more
mysterious.' Isn't that strange? There's no wind anymore, and
yet petals are dropping. And a bird in the canyon cries, and
that one sound in the mountains brings out the silence with a
wallop.

I remember when I was almost a child in the Pyrenees in the
southwest of France. We went way up in this gorgeous silence
of the mountains, but in the distance we could hear the bells
on the cows clanking. And somehow those tiny sounds brought
out the silence. And so in the same way, slight permanances
bring out change. And they give you this very strange sense.
Yugen. The mystery of change. You know, in Elliot's poem,
'The Four Quartets,' where he says 'The dark, dark, dark.
They all go into the dark, distinguished families, members of
the book of the director of directors, everybody, they all go
into the dark.' Life IS life, you see, because, just because
it's always disappearing.

http://www.deoxy.org/w_world.htm

____________________________________________________________________

GENE POOLE AND DAN BERKOW

G:
> Life is not doomed if we take the option of migrating into
> 'space', no in space-ships, but to learn to live here with
> full perception, everything seen, and then step into
> the 'interval' or 'emptiness', leaving behind dependence
> on the physical universe.

D:
Yes, by being dependent on the physical universe,
we are clinging to our own set of interlocking
assumptions, which assumptions include the "we"
who can "cling" ...

To be independent of the physical universe, is to
be independent of assumptions and expectations,
is to be independent of "spirituality" and
"the universe of consciousness" as well ...

G:
> The physical universe 'may be' an incubator, and
> school, to prepare 'the worthy' for expansion into
> 'space'. Nonduality 'may be' the fulcrum-point of this
> possible expansion, acting as a method of parsing
> layers of perception.

D:
Yes.

And, given that reality can't be produced
by assumptions, all preparatory processes are moot...

G:
> The issue of 'enlightenment' has been with us for
> as long as we can remember. It may be that the actual
> 'purpose' of enlightenment is to prepare us for our
> next evolutionary step, deliberate and bodiless
> conscious awareness.

D:
Which is,
awareness including all bodies, limited to and by none ...

All bodies are equally expressions of "what" neither has
nor lacks a body ...

G:
> The Holy Scriptures of antiquity seem to indicate the
> actuality of versions of 'heaven', and propose methods
> of purification of the 'soul' to enable a person to enter
> the 'afterlife'. It is possible that such scriptural teachings
> are actually 'echoes from the future', information
> embedded in the holomatrix of the universe.

D:
Well-said. Indeed!

"Let he who has ears, hear ..."

There is no lack of information, no
lack of echoes from the future.
By reading the previously hidden information,
you introduce yourself to the book
that is you. The information isn't hiding,
it's right here, on the surface, when
there is readiness. Reader and what is read
are one ...

G:
> Our (actual or latent) abilities to perceive 'higher dimensions'
> could be our means to understand and navigate in
> this space of emptiness; and our ability to co-exist and
> cooperate, may also be a key factor in this possible
> migration.

D:
It is all a cooperative production, from
the beginningless beginning, forms
rendered via communication, when
the "big picture" is viewed ...

G:
> It seems that certain 'Masters' have succeeded in
> 'going beyond' in this literal sense, which would itself
> indicate that the possible future is now.

D:
You mean, like Phillip K. Dick?
:-)

A toast to the future that is now ...

____________________________________________________________________

ANDREW MACNAB

I wonder what I was trying to say. In the context of the
discussion, that human communication is not exchange of
information, which could be analogous to exchanging bricks or
puzzle pieces, rather, human communication is analogous to
breathing and eating, ventilating and fuelling the fire of
life that it may burn bright and hot :-O Information is
fire!! not the air and fuel. I/you are information, are fire.
As any fire worshipper knows, there is only one fire
everbeen, fire is fire, though infinities of fires burn and
extinguish. * this is not information *

andrew

> --- In NondualitySalon@y..., andrew macnab <a.macnab@n...> wrote:
> > Whatever appears at the gated orifices
> > whatever appears at the gate
> > whatever appears
> > is instantly assembled
> > into something entirely new.
> > Something that bears as much resemblance
> > to whatever appears as you do to the air in your lungs.
> >
> > andrew

_________________________________________________________________

JERRY KATZ

Rick Strassman wrote a book called DMT: The Spirit Molecule.

<http://www.rickstrassman.com>

He talks about psychedelics and Buddhism at
<http://members.tripod.com/~parvati/strassman.html>. He
mentions where he got a lot of flak from his Zen community
because of his research. These days he's a psychiatrist in
Taos, New Mexico.

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