Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nonduality Highlights each day
How to submit material to the Highlights
#3033 - Monday, December 31, 2007 - Editor: Gloria Lee
Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
"You honor my soul. You bring
rivers
from the mountain springs. You brighten my eyes.
The wine you offer takes me out of myself
into the self we share."
Rumi
Testament
So often it has been displayed to us, the hourglass
with its grains of sand drifting down,
not as an object in our world
but as a sign, a symbol, our lives
drifting down grain by grain,
sifting away — I'm sure everyone must
see this emblem somewhere in the mind.
Yet not only our lives drift down. The stuff
of ego with which we began, the mass
in the upper chamber, filters away
as love accumulates below. Now
I am almost entirely love. I have been
to the banker, the broker, those strange
people, to talk about unit trusts,
annuities, CDs, IRAs, trying
to leave you whatever I can after
I die. I've made my will, written
you a long letter of instructions.
I think about this continually.
What will you do? How
will you live? You can't go back
to cocktail waitressing in the casino.
And your poetry? It will bring you
at best a pittance in our civilization,
a widow's mite, as mine has
for forty-five years. Which is why
I leave you so little. Brokers?
Unit trusts? I'm no financier doing
the world's great business. And the sands
in the upper glass grow few. Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses? And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below.
MONDAY,
31 DECEMBER, 2007
Listen
(RealAudio) | How
to listen
Poem: "Testament" by Hayden Carruth,
from Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems 1991-1995. © Copper Canyon Press, 1996.
"The experience of not forgetting consciousness
alone is the state of
devotion which is the relationship of unfading real love, because
the
real knowledge of Self, which shines as the undivided supreme
bliss
itself, surges up as the nature of love.
Love itself is the actual form of God. That is pure bliss. Call
it
pure bliss, God, Self, or what you will. That is devotion, that
is
realization and that is everything."
- Sri Ramana
~ ~ ~
The experience of not forgetting consciousness alone is the
state of
devotion which is the relationship of unfading real love, because
the
real knowledge of Self, which shines as the undivided supreme
bliss
itself, surges up as the nature of love.
Love itself is the actual form of God. That is pure bliss. Call
it
pure bliss, God, Self, or what you will. That is devotion, that
is
realization and that is everything."
- Sri Ramana
posted by Bob O'Hearn
"The Madhyamakavatara says:
The kaya of peace is luminous like a wish-fulfilling tree.
Like a wish-fulfilling gem, it is inconceivable.
Till beings are liberated, it is always there
To benefit the world, appearing as simplicity."
- Longchenpa
from the website
http://www.buddhistinformation.com/tibetan/greatchariot14.htm
posted to Daily Dharma
Bliss is generated by coming into the natural
state. Just being what is truly found at the core
of our being generates compassion. From this
perspective, awakening is simply freedom from past patterns of
blocking Reality -- or, an experiential recognition of the
relativity of all
things.
This does *not* mean, however, that
relative things disappear,
or even that they are suddenly and mysteriously transformed.
All the teachers and buddhas and sages who
said, "IT is here and now" really weren't kidding! IT
*is*
here and now, with things exactly as they are! And, this
includes *all* of who we are within the present moment --
including all the "putzy" and idiosyncratic aspects of
being human.
This is what is so amazing and heartening and liberating for
each of us, i.e., the recognition that we don't need to do
or fix *anything* in order to "achieve" Buddha-hood!
Our
innate nature -- this state of exquisitely pure, awakened
and naked Awareness -- is already inherent within our
ordinary, immediate experience.
Perhaps the best reminder of this is the clear insight of
Garab Dorje, the first Dzogchen master:
Directly discover your state.
Don't remain in doubt.
Gain confidence in self-liberation.
The moment of awakening may be marked
by an outburst of laughter,
but this is not the laughter of someone
who has won the lottery or some kind of victory.
It is the laughter of one who,
after searching for something for a long time,
suddenly finds it in the pocket of his coat.
-Thich Nhat Hanh
Zen Keys
posted to DzogchenPractice by Jax
In the end, when truth is seen and its
relativities are transcended, there is only this:
nonduality, nonorigination, and noncausality.
— Paul Brunton, Notebooks
posted to Wisdom-l by Mark Scorelle
A warm welcome to our new friends in the group. Also my
best wishes for the coming year to the friends gathered here, old
and new!
Thank you for being :-)
My absolute favourite youtube video of this year is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiBTbi7We90
God is Love.
Amen.
/\
Ben
[ Amen and same Best Wishes to all our readers. Gloria ]