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#2882 - Wednesday, July 25, 2007 - Editor: Gloria Lee
Nondual Highlights http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
One: Essential Writings on Nonduality: http://tinyurl.com/2blmhy
In the Absence of Definition.
Of course there are many different expressions of love. But when you point to any experience of true love, you know love exists even in the absence of that experience.
Every time you name it, or say "This is how love is" or "This is how love feels," you notice that it also exists in the absence of that definition.
You can't really get your hands around it and say "This is what true love really is," because it transcends that. It's kind of like a self. It can't be found.
So you might say, "I can't find a self so there must not be one."
And yet, there is something that is awake and shining and conscious, even if that something is radiant nothingness.
From: 'Emptiness Dancing', by Adyashanti. www.adyashanti.org
O longing mind
O longing mind,
consecrate your being to pure love.
Turn every thought to Goddess Tara.
She will bear you tenderly across the raging sea
of separation and individuality.
Be utterly
dedicated to her reality.
Cry aloud Ma Kali, Ma Kali.
Know that she can clarify
the inconceivable maze of relativity.
To hope for assistance and guidance through this world
from wealth, relatives, and religious rites
provides no profound solution.
Have you forgotten that everyone is lost?
Where are you now?
Why are you traveling?
This cosmos is the strange theater where souls act,
wearing various costumes and disguises.
This intricate play of transparent energy
is initiated, sustained, and dissolved by Kali,
who is the dream power of Absolute Reality.
At this very moment, you are resting
on the vast lap of Mother's cosmic dream
that you misperceive
as the narrow prison of suffering.
Why abandon the kingdom of awareness
to obsession with self and disdain for others,
to hollow passion and abject clinging?
You are creating a disease without a remedy.
The brief day of your earthly life is almost over.
Meditate now on beautiful Black Tara.
She is seated upon the jewel island of essence
in the transparent sea of ultimacy.
This poet sings
drunkenly:
"Tara! Tara! Tara!
Your name is ambrosia.
May all beings enter the secret sanctuary
through this name,
tasting your unique sweetness,
self-luminous awareness."
Ramprasad
Posted by Alan Larus with photos here:
http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/O_longing_mind.htm
Live Thought or Dead? The Zen Point of View:
The Masters of Zen rarely
discoursed. Discoursing they regarded as one of the obstacles to
enlightenment, for it encouraged and developed the wrong kind of
thinking - that 'mentation' or 'intellection' which affirms our
false identification with a fictitious ego.
'The ignorant are delighted with
discoursing,' the Lankavatara Sutra states, 'discoursing is a
source of suffering in the triple world.' We would not doubt it;
yes, indeed, but when the Lanka says that discoursing is a source
of suffering it means more particularly that it is a hindrance to
the removal of ignorance, and so perpetuates our normal state of
suffering.
But, nowadays, what was meant by
discoursing is chiefly represented by books. In books, as
conventionally and commercially produced today, no idea can be
conveyed in less than about ten thousand words - with apologies
for not making it a hundred thousand, in which form it would have
been much 'better'. No chance for anyone to think except the
author!
Yet, when ideas are buried in a
haystack of verbiage, who remembers them, and, conversely, when
ideas are concisely expressed, who pays any attention to them?
The most vital statements of the sages and prophets, even of the
Buddha and Jesus, are not taken seriously - presumably because
they are not served up in a sauce that conceals their flavour and
substitutes its own.
Instead of apologizing for not
burying their ideas even more deeply in verbiage would not modern
authors do better to apologise whenever they are unable to
express an idea more concisely than in, say, one thousand words?
Ideas may vary in the amount of expression they need, for many a
hundred words should be ample. After all, the more fully
ex-pressed the less juice there remains in them, the more
complete the exposition the more dead they are on delivery; ideas
mummified in words are only museum specimens.
The ideas of the Masters, expressed in half a dozen words, are still alive after centuries, but they are fingers pointing to intuitional understanding, not fossilized examples of intellection.
--Wei Wu Wei http://web.ionsys.com/~remedy/WEI%20WU%20WEI.htm ---------------- "Timsmit" writes: PB (Paul Brunton) certainly knew Wei Wu Wei well, and they visited occasionally right up to the end of PB's life (He predeceased Wei Wu Wei by 6 years). PB even bought (shudder) coffee* for his visits! here's an extract from my talks with PB:
Wei Wu Wei, Glimpses
1/28/79
The
ego disappeared, the cosmic took over, he got the experience in
the presence of a Chinese abbot; he (Wei Wu Wei) had only met one
other who had had a similar experience, and that was Douglas
Harding, who has come to
These
two talk of it as an experience; at least Harding talked of it as
an experience. Something came and went. But another
student of mine had that experience of everything disappearing.
But it all comes back again. She's had that experience
once, maybe twice, the absence of all phenomena, of consciousness
alone.
Wei
Wu Wei didn't have any revelation of anything, except that
nothing was there, but he was not there, there was only reality,
he was aware of consciousness, but not any particular
consciousness. He was negated. He lost his ego, but
how much of it remains? He came back, he had to come back
to consciousness. They had a glimpse. It comes in
different degrees, that is different from what is taught by the
sages as realization of THAT. If it stays, then it's
realization; if it doesn't, then it's a glimpse, it's an
experience.
* re PB's views on coffee: "that just shows that no Englishman, even an enlightened one can make decent coffee..." posted to Wisdom-l
Question: Falling in love with "what
is" is a very delicate and extemely refined experience. I
imagine that this is the next stage in our development because it
opens us up. But what happens after that? I'm afraid that it
could get very flat, arid, and desert-like. Answer:
Not at all. We need to be careful because we're talking about
awakening in a conceptual manner. While some people do get
through a temporary desert-like period, what actually happens is
the dropping of the sense of separation. Thereafter, of course,
they see everything from another point of view. When people talk
about this to me, I know it's genuinely happened because they
can't really describe it. They often say, "It's absolutely
stunning." They also say, "Why doesn't everybody get
it? Why doesn't everybody see that it's the nearest thing to them
right now? It's nearer than anything else, including their own
breathing. It's simply Being and pure presence." After
awakening there's a direct, immediate, and complete
transformation. It doesn't happen to everyone, but it happens to
many.
From: Invitation to Awaken, Tony Parsons
This poet sings
From a long walk ...
http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/this_poet_sings.htm
http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/puffins.htm
Alan Larus
Starfish
This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?
Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.
And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.
Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.
So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.
--Eleanor Lerman, from Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds
Marguerite Porete was a 14th century French
mystic who authored a
book entitled "The mirror of simple annihilated souls and
those who
only remain in will and desire of love". This book was
condemned by
the French Inquisition as being heretical. Marguerite Porete was
asked to recant. When she refused to respond to her inquisitors,
she
was condemned to death. On 1 June 1310 she was burned at the
stake in
Paris.
http://www.pbase.com/1heart/marguerite_porete
M. Porete quotation with image montage by Bob
O'Hearn