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#3119 - Friday, March 28, 2008 -
Editor: Jerry Katz
Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
A poem by Shannon Brophy
about the ego.
A confession by Charlie Hayes on "this
space of being."
Impressions by Doris on the Chinese Christmas
card inscription posted in issue 3118.
My Ego is a Condemned
Stucture
It thinks it is the most
majestic building in the neighborhood,
Though observers know it is
the worst eyesore.
Will you help me tear this
thing down?
Will you remind me that
emptiness is a beautiful lot in which to grow beingness?
Let wild nature take over
As the space called me is
lived.
Call the demolition crew!
I am ready to be
annihilated.
Shannon Brophy
Charlie Hayes
What Are You? What Are You NOT?
Are you aware? Is there anything wrong with that awareness? This - Empty Awareness arising as Aliveness - is what You are. This Alive Awareness is not a concept and not an experience. What you are is non-conceptual, always fresh, Presence-Awareness, paradoxically Empty yet Full, Nothing arising as Everything. Look at the mind and all you find is a few thoughts, feelings, and perceptions coming and going in this No Thing of Being-Awareness. Do you find a person in the mind? No. Only this space of being - a pure and empty knowing.
Just This and Nothing Else
YOU are NOT a knower or thinker, NOT an
experiencer or a separate entity at all. You are this Unchanging
Presence, in which there appears the presence of "being
present" in the waking state and the presence of "being
absent" in deep sleep. Obviously, in deep sleep the body is
"being lived", as the heart beats, cells are born and
others die, the lungs are breathed etc. Not as obviously perhaps,
the exact same being-lived happens in dreaming and waking states.
The afterthought of an I that is a doer breathing or thinking is
nothing but a passing fancy. Seeing that a thought of an I is NOT
who you are is true Self-Knowledge. That's all there is to
"get".
Love!
http://www.theeternalstate.org
USA +1 580 366-4083
(From Issue 3118) A Highlights reader writes:
One of my chinese students in China give me a Christmas card at
Christmas past.
On one side she had written these words presumably copied from
some text.
I just wondered if you had heard these words before or thought
they might be of interest/relevance.
(Strange christmas card verse I thought )
"Happiness is accompanied by sorrow and it would turn sunny
after rain as well.
If rain remains after rain and sorrow remains after sorrow,
please take these farewells easy and turn to smilingly look for
yourself who is never to appear."
Dear Jerry,
I never heard of these words, but because they moved me, I
decided to share my impressions.
Zen Buddhism talks about Awake Mind —unborn,
unbiased, neither grasping nor rejecting any”thing”.
This unborn Mind IS Consciousness, our true (you could say
primary) Identity. It IS ground of all being
and IS behind EVERYTHING yet “is never to appear”.
That which appears, “the two in One” (subject and
experienced objects) are farewells in
that they come and go.
Whether happiness follows sorrow, or sorrow follows sorrow,
and whether sunshine follows rain, or rain follows rain, it
doesn’t really matter,
it’s all the same... coming from, and returning to the
unborn Mind.
In a dialogue between Michael Harner and Jack Kornfield about
Buddhism and Shamanism.
Michael asks Jack, What gets reincarnated?
Jack pauses for a moment and then says, No-thing.
“Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form,...not
born, not destroyed,”is what Zen Buddhism teaches.
The unborn Mind always IS, whereas subjects and experienced
objects (which are empty) come and go.
Jesus is born, BUT (!) Jesus represents the unborn Mind
(Christ-Consciousness),
so Christmas seems a good time to reflect on these words.
To the unborn Mind and all its wondrous manifestations,
Doris