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Nondual
Highlights: Issue #2963, Sunday, October 21, 2007, Editor: Mark
For God, you bring nothing worth having except your entire
availability. He alone knows the moment and the way. Have no plan
for your life, just keep yourself free of anything that could
prevent God from moving you as he wishes.
- from The Hermitage Within by an anonymous Cistercian
monk
For me, the purpose (or meaning, if you like) of life is to shift
one's centre of gravity from who I thought I was to Who I AM.
`Seeing' is important only as a means to this End - which is to
be the Absolute Mystery, to know oneself as Absolutely
Incomprehensible. There's no joy like this!
- Douglas Harding
Life moves, undulates, breathes in and out, contracting and
expanding. This is its nature, the nature of what is. Whatever
is, is on the move. Nothing remains the same for very long. The
mind wants everything to stop so that it can get its foothold,
find its position, so it can figure out how to control life.
Through the pursuit of material things, knowledge, ideas,
beliefs, opinions, emotional states, spiritual states, and
relationships, the mind seeks to find a secure position from
which to operate.
The mind seeks to nail life down and get it to stop moving and
changing. When this doesn't work, the mind begins to seek the
changeless, the eternal, something that doesn't move. But the
mind of thought is itself an expression of life's movement and so
must always be in movement itself. When there is thought, that
thought is always moving and changing. There is really no such
thing as thought. There is only thinking, so thought which is
always moving (as thinking) cannot apprehend the changeless.
When thought enters into the changeless it goes silent. When
thought goes silent, the thinker, the psychological
"me," the image-produced self, disappears. Suddenly it
is gone. You, as an idea, are gone. Awareness remains alone.
There is no one who is aware. Awareness itself is itself. You are
now no longer the thought, nor the thinker, nor someone who is
aware. Only awareness remains, as itself. Then, within awareness,
thought moves. Within the changeless, change happens.
Now awareness expresses itself. Awareness is always expressing
itself: as life, as change, as thought, feelings, bodies, humans,
plants, trees, cars, etc. Awareness yields to itself, to its
inherent creativity, to its expression in form, to experience
itself. The changeless is changing. The eternal is living and
dying. The formless is form. The form is formless. This is
nothing the mind could have ever imagined.
- Adyashanti
Becoming aware of that which is Aware puts you in a different
relationship to yourself and life, one in which you are free to
respond naturally and spontaneously according to what the moment
demands rather than out of your conditioned ideas and beliefs.
This is a remarkable and life-altering shift - this simple shift
to being aware of yourself as Awareness. Moving from the ego to
essence is simply a shift of attention away from thought onto
that which is aware of thought.
- Gina Lake
If someone were to ask me for advice on this `search' for
completeness, I would say something like the following: All the
contrived `postures' and `attitudes' of my seeking led me
nowhere, except around and around on a circuit of endless
mentations. Only with the expansive openness of `not seeking' did
a clear view dawn in me. Many helpful hints and examples (of it)
were thrown my way by Teachers and Life itself. This intrinsic
knowing shines through the ignorance of seeking. What is not
apparent for some is that this intrinsic knowing is already here.
Its fullness is seemingly diminished (ignored) by mind stuff in
the psychological posture of a `person' that is `seeking'. And so
I would say, relax back into your own true nature of openness.
From this openness, a view dawns that all is well.
- Gilbert Schultz
When Realization Dawns
The seeker needs to stay right in the middle of any
disorientation or sense of not knowing what to do because, by
staying there, without resistance and without moving away from
it, in that moment something new starts to be born.
Feel in your own experience what starts to be born when you let
yourself experience the disorientation of the spiritual seeker
who stops seeking a different experience than the one that is
happening right now. You can feel the seeker dissolving and the
peace emerging, which is the peace the seeker was always looking
for anyway.
As the seeker dissolves, then the peace is born, and there is
stillness. This is not a quality of stillness that has any
dependence on an emotional state. At the moment when the seeker
starts to dissolve and there is just peace, then the pendulum
might swing into a high spiritual state or into a very ordinary
state, or even into an unpleasant state, and the peace itself
remains completely independent of those states.
This is the dawning of the realization that only from the place
where the seeker is dissolving can freedom happen because there
is no longer any movement toward or away from experience.
- Adyashanti, from Emptiness Dancing, posted to The_Now2