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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3204, Saturday, June 21, 2008, Editor: Mark
People are distracted by objects of desire,
and afterwards repent of the lust they've indulged,
because they have indulged with a phantom
and are left even farther from Reality than before.
Your desire for the illusory is a wing,
by means of which a seeker might ascend to Reality.
When you have indulged a lust, your wing drops off;
you become lame and that fantasy flees.
Preserve the wing and don't indulge such lust,
so that the wing of desire may bear you to Paradise.
People fancy they are enjoying themselves,
but they are really tearing out their wings
for the sake of an illusion.
- Rumi, Mathnawi III: 2133-2138, version by Camille and
Kabir Helminski, from Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance, posted
to Sunlight
Harmony between the inner and the outer is happiness. On the
other hand, self-identification with the outer causes suffering.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj, posted to ANetofJewels
Mind is without form and pervades the ten directions:
In the eye it is called seeing.
In the ear it is called hearing.
In the nose it smells odors
. In the mouth it holds converse.
In the hands it grasps and seizes,
In the feet it runs and carries.
Fundamentally it is one pure radiance;
divided it becomes the six harmoniously united spheres of sense.
Since the mind is nonexistent, wherever you are, you are
emancipated.
- Rinzai
Commentary: Because we ignore the One mind, because we are
identified with the senses and what they tell us, we are bound
and in prison.
- Albert Low
From the book; Zen and the Sutras,, posted to Daily Dharma
There is an eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad
forms of life that are subject to birth and death.... It is your
very presence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the
feeling of your own presence.
This Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form in
its innermost and indestructible essence. This means that it is
accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature.
But don't seek to grasp it with your mind. Don't try to
understand it.
You can know it only when the mind is still. When you are
present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now,
Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.
To regain awareness of Being and to abide in the state of
'feeling-realization' is enlightenment.
The work "enlightenment" conjures up the idea of some
superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way,
but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness of Being...
It is finding your true nature beyond name and form.
- Eckhart Tolle, from Practicing the Power of Now, posted
to SufiMystic
Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and
that, there is another self more really us than I. And the more
you become aware of the unknown self -- if you become aware of it
-- the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with
everything else that is. You are a function of this total galaxy,
bounded by the Milky Way, and this galaxy is a function of all
other galaxies. You are that vast thing that you see far, far off
with great telescopes. You look and look, and one day you are
going to wake up and say, "Why, that's me!" And in
knowing that, you know that you never die. You are the eternal
thing that comes and goes, that appears -- now as John Jones, now
as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown -- and so it goes, forever and
ever and ever.
- Alan Watts, posted to AlongTheWay
Why did you come to the Master?
Because my life was going nowhere, giving me nothing.
So where's it going now?
No where
And what's it giving you now?
Nothing.
So, what's the difference?
Now I'm going nowhere because there's nowhere to go;
I'm getting nothing because there's nothing to desire.
- Anthony de Mello, S.J., posted to The_Now2