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Nondual Highlights: Issue #2976, Sunday, November 4, 2007, Editor: Mark



The Open Heart
What Does It Mean to Be Mindful?

By paying attention to the present moment, we can begin to appreciate what we already have - and grasp the key to life.

To understand mindfulness, imagine yourself doing something very simple, something that doesn't arouse a compelling interest - like, say, eating an apple. You probably eat your apple not paying attention to how it smells, how it tastes, or how it feels in your hand. Because of the ways we're conditioned, we don't usually notice the quality of our attention. Done this way, eating the apple is not a fulfilling experience.

So you blame the apple. You might think, if only I had a banana, I'd be happy. So you get a banana, but eat it the same way, and still there's not a lot of fulfillment. And then you think, if only I had a mango - and go to great expense and some difficulty getting a mango. But it's the same thing all over again. We don't pay attention to what we have or what we're doing. As a result, we seek more and more intensity of stimulation to try to rectify what seems unfulfilling.

Robert Frost wrote that life is an interminable chain of longing. The Buddha said that those who are heedless or mindless are as if dead already. Mindfulness is the quality of fullness of attention, immediacy, non-distraction. In that sense, it is the key to life.

- Sharon Salzberg, posted to DailyDharma




If your thought is frozen, practice remembrance of God.
Recollection of God brings thought into movement:
make remembrance the sun for this congealed thought.

- Rumi, Mathnawi VI: 1475-1476, version by Camille and Kabir Helminski from Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance, posted to Sunlight




Does happiness reflect in your face
from the wine of the true religion?
Where is your generous hand
if you've beheld the Ocean of Abundance?
The one who sees the River doesn't grudge water to the thirsty,
especially the one who has beheld that Sea and those mighty Clouds.

- Rumi, Mathnawi VI: 804-805, version by Camille and Kabir Helminski, from Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance, posted to Sunlight




i searched for the purpose
of manifestation.
for the dharma
that caused 'yosy'
to be.
and found out that the job,
allocated by cosmos
to the temporary name and form
known as
"me" -
is simply to vanish slowly
like the cheshire cat;
and when gone -
to leave behind
a lasting smile
on all the faces
i see.

BOOM!

yosy, posted to NondualitySalon




There's no problem in this moment. It's only when you begin to think of tomorrow or the next week that you think of problems. But if you learn to stay centered in the moment where nothing is happening, this moment will become the next moment. And the next moment will become the next hour, the next day, the next week, and the next year. This is how to live, from moment to moment. If you do, you will realize that all is well. All is perfectly well. Never forget that.

- Robert Adams, from Silence of the Heart, posted to The_Now2




Will it be better for us when
we dissolve into the ground? Or worse?

Let's learn now - what will happen:
This is lovers' work - to break through
And become the earth - to die before we die.

Don't think of pairing-up somehow with God!
That claim is a religious self-indulgence.

You know it by the smell:
Smoke coming off dried dung...
is different from that of aloe wood!
The Presence - at one second, is soil,
then water, fire, smoke, woof, warp - a friend...

And is too vast - and intimate
for partnership!

Observers watch - as Presence
takes thousands of forms.

But inside your eyes - the Presence
doesn't brighten or dim.

It just lives there.

A mystic can see the tree of heaven -
Its fruit hanging so close...

- Rumi, Ghazal 941, posted to Mystic_Spirit

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