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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3219, Sunday, July 6, 2008, Editor: Mark
Turn your attention away from the dream right now. Just for right
now, you don't need it. Let the thoughts and worries of the dream
character continue as they will, but just step back for a moment
and watch it happen, watch the dream character involved in its
dream.
And while the dream character is going about its business, turn
your attention to the one thing right now that is shining and
clear, peaceful and unassuming, steady and solid: the
consciousness with which the dream character is being observed.
Just rest here, in the unchanging consciousness which reflects
but is not changed by what it reflects. This is reality. Nothing
else is.
Rest your attention here. Get to know it. Let the reality of
consciousness be known to you, as you. Nothing needs to be done
here. No thought affects it, and so thought is not needed. No
action affects it, and so action is not needed.
It's not possible to do anything with this consciousness because
this consciousness is everything already. Pay attention to it for
a moment right now and it is easily noticed that consciousness is
complete. And since consciousness is complete, you are complete.
The only thing that ever makes you feel like you are not
complete, not whole, and that you need to "return"
somewhere to find wholeness, is that you have put your attention
into the dream life, and forgotten that wholeness is all that you
really are.
So observe the dream character as it desires enlightenment, and
as it desires love, reassurance, respect. Watch the dream
character as its life plays out. It is not who you are. You are
this consciousness, which has no mortality, no vulnerability, and
no limits. Beyond all imagination, the nothingness within which
resides the seed of all existence, the shining creation of
infinite universes - this is you.
Put your attention here, and allow your sense of this to grow. If
you are looking for Wholeness, here it is. If you are looking for
True Love, here it is, in the One Unlimited Self that is Reality.
No other love is possible. And this Love is already here, as You.
It's only a matter of attention.
- Annette Nibley
Endless meeting
I want to share with you something that happened the other day,
because it exposes the obstacle to a true meeting. And it points
to the necessity of a true meeting, to really receive what is
being offered here. I was meeting with a small group of people,
and I had never met this man before. As we spoke, he quoted
Ramana and Papaji and Gangaji and another guru that he had
followed, but it was clear that he had no satisfaction. I mean,
he could quote Ramana much better than I could quote Ramana. He
quoted me much better than I could, but what's the use if there
is no satisfaction, and he was really frustrated. So I tried,
unsuccessfully, to point out to him that it was not in the words.
What Ramana was pointing to when he said, "be still"
and what this man heard, were really different things. And he
couldn't get that. He was looking at the words, "be
still." And he was unaware that he was interpreting those
words through his own understanding, and that his interpretation
was an obstacle to receiving what Ramana was transmitting to him
in the phrase "be still." So we went at it for a while,
and we never met. It was an encounter but we didn't meet.
And that is often the way it is in our lives. We know when we
have felt met, or recognized or seen or gotten, and we know when
we haven't been met. And we know the frustration of our parents
not meeting us, not seeing us, not getting us, or our lovers, or
our friends, our government. We know that frustration and yet
there is this place within each of us where we are stopping the
meeting. The meeting is stopped when we believe that the words we
hear (the way that we hear them), are what is being offered.
So I want to make it as clear as I can that what I am saying is
not in the particular words I use. These words come from my
vocabulary, from my life experience, from the way my brain is
wired, from my interests. They somehow come together,
metaphorically, to speak of what is true. But the transmission,
which is alive and which your heart can resonate with, is really
what this meeting is about. The words are not necessarily in the
way of that unless you think you understand or if you think you
know what it is about. What I am saying to you is: just forget
all of that. What you think is irrelevant. Thought can be
wondrous, beautiful, elevated, horrible, terrifying, true, a lie.
But in this moment of actually meeting one another it is
irrelevant. The transmission is heart to heart, and then mind to
mind. The mind is a part of the transmission, but the mind has to
follow the heart.
We have built our reality on thinking ourselves. And that is very
powerful: I mean humans rule the earth. This is a huge part of
our conditioning and it has to be recognized. This man I am
referring to, refused to recognize it. He thought, he knew what
"still" means: it means S-T-I-L-L. Period. End of
conversation. And so that was the end of the conversation. The
possibility we have here is for this to be the beginning of the
conversation. What I want to say to you, very simply, is that the
truth of you is already awake, is already free, is already pure,
is already beautiful, whole, and in love with itself. And the
only thing that keeps you from realizing this truth of yourself,
really, fully, and completely - is the belief that what you think
about yourself is real.
Regarding the truth of which you are, right now, thought will not
help you. If you will give up searching for who you are in your
thoughts; if you are willing to stop thinking yourself, stop
planning yourself, stop remembering yourself, then in an instant,
you meet yourself. Effortlessly. And the capacity for that
meeting is what brings us together. We are all here to support
one another in the deepest, truest meeting, so that each life
here can be lived in the deepest, truest way: an unknown way, an
unthought way, an unremembered way.
So as we engage in conversation, I invite those of you listening
to the question or report to recognize that it is your own mind,
your own heart, your own self. And then this meeting, which is a
beginning, really has no end. The reverberations of what occurs
here individually and collectively are endless. Because once
there is true meeting, a recognition of what is true, what is
real, who you are, who one another is, then there is choice about
how to live one's life. There is responsibility in that all of a
sudden you discover the capacity to respond, to be fresh and
innocent and not know - to let the core of oneself direct your
life.
- Gangaji, Public Meeting - August 21, 2005