Nonduality Salon Highlights, #1578

As a painter is frightened by the terrible figure of a
Yaksa which he himself has drawn, so is a fool frightened
in the world (by his own false notions).

Even as a fool going himself to a quagmire is drowned
therein, so are beings drowned in the quagmire of false
notions and are unable to come out thereof.

At the moment of profound insight, you transcend both appearance and emptiness.

All Modes of mind are Really Only Mind

Subhuti, what do you think? Does the Tathagata possess the human eye?
Yes, World-honored One, He does.

Well, do you think the Tathagata possesses the divine eye?
Yes, World-honored One, He does.

And do you think the Tathagata possesses the gnostic eye?
Yes, World-honored One, He does.

And do you think the Tathagata possesses the eye of transcendent wisdom?
Yes, World-honored One, He does.

And do you think the Tathagata possesses the Buddha-eye of omniscience?
Yes, World-honored One, He does.

Subhuti, what do you think? Concerning the sand-grains of the Ganges, has the Buddha taught about them?
Yes, World-honored One, the Tathagata has taught concerning these grains.

Well, Subhuti, if there were as many Ganges rivers as the sand-grains of the Ganges and there was a Buddha-land for each sand-grain in all those Ganges rivers, would those Buddha-lands be many?
[Subhuti replied]: Many indeed, World-honored One!

Then Buddha said: Subhuti, however many living beings there are in all those Buddha-lands, though they have manifold modes of mind, the Tathagata understands them all. Wherefore? Because the Tathagata teaches that all these are not Mind; they are merely called "mind". Subhuti, it is impossible to retain past mind, impossible to hold on to present mind, and impossible to grasp future mind.

Then said Mahamati to the Blessed One:

Why is it that the ignorant are given up to discrimination and the wise are not?

The Blessed One replied :

It is because the ignorant cling to names, signs
and ideas; as their mind move along these channels they feed on multiplicities
of objects and fall into the notion of an ego-soul and what belongs to it ;
they make discriminations of good and bad among appearances and cling
to the agreeable.

As they thus cling there is a reversion to ignorance, and karma born of greed,
anger and folly, is accumulated.

As the accumulation of karma goes on they become imprisoned in a cocoon
of discrimination and are henceforth unable to free themselves from the round
of birth and death.

Because of the folly they do not understand that all things are like maya,
like the reflection of the moon in water, that there is no self-substance to be imagined
as an ego-soul and its belongings, and that all their definitive ideas rise from
their false discriminations of what exists only as it is seen of the mind itself.

They do not realise that things have nothing to do with qualified and qualifying,
nor with the course of birth, abiding and destruction, and instead they assert
that they are born of a creator, of time, of atoms, of some celestial spirit.
It is because the ignorant are given up to discrimination that they move along
with the stream of appearances, but it is not so with the wise.

Lankavatara Sutra

It is certain that the nature of the mind is empty and without any foundation whatsoever.

It is certain that self-originated primal awareness has been clear (and luminous) from the very beginning,

It is certain that this primal awareness or gnosis, which is one's intrinsic awareness, is unceasing,

It is certain that the diversity of movements (arising in the mind) are not apprehendable by memories,

It is certain that whatever appearances occur, all of them are self-manifested,

It is certain that all of the diverse characteristics of things are liberated into their own condition,

The Western poet Rainer Maria Rilke has said that our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure. The fear that impermanence awakens in us, that nothing is real and nothing lasts, is, we come to discover, our greatest friend because it drives us to ask: If everything dies and changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances, something boundless and infinitely spacious, something in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place? Is there something in fact we can depend on, that does survive what we call death?

Allowing these questions to occupy us urgently, and reflecting on them, we slowly find ourselves making a profound shift in the way we view everything. With continued contemplation and practice in letting go, we come to uncover in ourselves "something" we cannot name or describe or conceptualize, "something" that we begin to realize lies behind all the changes and deaths of the world. The narrow desires and distractions to which our obsessive grasping onto permanence has condemned us begin to dissolve and fall away.

As this happens we catch repeated and glowing glimpses of the vast implications behind the truth of impermanence. It is as if all our lives we have been flying in an airplane through dark clouds and turbulence, when suddenly the plane soars above these into the clear, boundless sky. Inspired and exhilarated by this emergence into a new dimension of freedom, we come to uncover a depth of peace, joy, and confidence in ourselves that fills us with wonder, and breeds in us gradually a certainty that there is in us "something" that nothing destroys, that nothing alters, and that cannot die.

Strictly speaking, there is no me, because all is
emptiness. I am empty, I am non-existent. All is
bliss.

7

This truth law has no more reality than the world.

8

You are the golden eternity because there is no me
and no you, only one golden eternity.

9

The Realizer. Entertain no imaginations whatever,
for the thing is a no-thing. Knowing this then is
Human Godhood.

10

This world is the movie of what everything is, it
is one movie, made of the same stuff throughout,
belonging to nobody, which is what everything is.

11

If we were not all the golden eternity we wouldnt
be here. Because we are here we cant help being
pure. To tell man to be pure on account of the
punishing angel that punishes the bad and the
rewarding angel that rewards the good would be like
telling the water "Be Wet"-Never the less, all
things depend on supreme reality, which is already
established as the record of Karma earned-fate.

12

God is not outside us but is just us, the living
and the dead, the never-lived and never-died. That
we should learn it only now, is supreme reality, it
was written a long time ago in the archives of
universal mind, it is already done, there's no more
to do.

--The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

The Texture of Being
by Roy Whenary"We do not need to search in order to find our true Being. We already are it, and the mind which searches for it is the very reason why we cannot find it."
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Monkfish Publishing presents:
ENLIGHTENMENT BLUES. My Years with an American Guru, By Andre van der Braak.
THE LANKAVATARA SUTRA. An Epitomized Version, Translated by D.T. Suzuki. Compiled/Edited by Dwight Goddard.