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#2713 - Sunday, January 28, 2007 - Editor: Gloria Lee
Nondual Highlights
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
--Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Between the great things
we cannot do
and the small things we will not do,
the danger is that we shall do nothing.
--Adolph Monod
An object has a reflection: When looking we see two images, yet there is only one thing. Likewise, this world is a reflection of the Supreme Lord. We may see two, yet only One exists…
--Jnaneshwar
From "Teachings of the Hindu Mystics,"
© 2001 by Andrew Harvey.
"Subject-object
thinking seems to cover the natural state (awareness).
But without awareness, thinking could not take place. Because
thinking
appears in awareness (like a cloud appears in the sky), realise
that
thinking in essence is awareness. Understanding this, thinking
cannot
obscure awareness".
--"Sailor" Bob Adamson
We can see that implicit
in all five precepts is the age-old Indian
principle of ahimsa: not harming--either others or oneself. We
can
safely extend this to the environment, the world as a whole and
even
to outer space. Nothing in fact falls outside the sphere of our
moral
responsibility. For instance, according to the Huayen school of
Buddhist philosophy, which developed in medieval China, our every
action affects the whole of the Universe. The grave environmental
problems we now face on Planet Earth stem from our ignorance of
this fact. Yet, perplexingly, even as we begin to see what we are
doing
and what suffering it will bring down on both ourselves and our
descendants, we find it very difficult to change our ways.
Everyone is
aware that it would be a good thing if there were fewer cars, but
no
one wants to give up their own!
--John Snelling, Elements of Buddhism
We’re in a giant car
heading toward a brick wall and
everyone’s arguing over where they’re going to sit.
--David Suzuki
In the long
term, the economy and the environment are the same
thing. If it’s unenvironmental, it is uneconomical. That is
the rule of
nature.
--Mollie Beattie
II, 16
How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing -
each stone, blossom, child -
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle
ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
So, like children, we
begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.
This is what the things
can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~
(Rilke's Book of Hours: Love
Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna
Macy)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Book_of_Hours_II_16.html
music link (left button to play, right button to
save)