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#3249 -
Wednesday, August 6, 2008 - Editor: Gloria Lee
Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Just because we are (mostly) limited to using words here, it may appear sometimes that nonduality is all talk. For a practical and literally "down to earth" application, few excel like Wendell Berry. For him, the One appears as watersheds and sustainable soil use that can last 4,000 years, as he wants to fit the needs of mankind into environmental causes that quite often can only spare the natural world by keeping man out of it. Lately, we hear "think globally and act locally", yet Berry has done exactly that for the past 40 years. I can only give a link to the interview that was in July's issue of The Sun Magazine and urge you to read all of it. -Gloria
Fearnside: In your essay “Standing by Words” you note that love is not abstract and cannot lead to abstract action. Love is the catalyst for concrete action, which is taking responsibility for what we do here and now. It seems to me that in some ways this kind of love is the salvation of the world.
Berry: That’s true. But like religion, love has to be practiced. It has to find something to do. Love isn’t just a feeling. It’s an instruction: Love one another. That’s hard to do. It doesn’t mean to sit at home and have fond feelings. You’ve got to treat people as if you love them, whether you do or not.
An excerpt from "Esarhaddon, King of Assyria" by Leo Tolstoy
"Do you now understand,"
continued the old man, "that Lailie is you, and the warriors
you put to death were you also? And not the warriors only, but
the animals which you slew when hunting and ate at your feasts
were also you. You thought life dwelt in you alone but I have
drawn aside the veil of delusion, and have let you see that by
doing evil to others you have done it to yourself also. Life is
one in them all, and yours is but a portion of this same common
life. And only in that one part of life that is yours, can you
make life better or worse -- increasing or decreasing it. You can
only improve life in yourself by destroying the barriers that
divide your life from that of others, and by considering others
as yourself, and loving them. By so doing you increase your share
of life. You injure your life when you think of it as the only
life, and try to add to its welfare at the expense of other
lives. By so doing you only lessen it. To destroy the life that
dwells in others is beyond your power. The life of those you have
slain has vanished from your eyes, but is not destroyed. You
thought to lengthen your own life and to shorten theirs, but you
cannot do this. Life knows neither time nor space. The life of a
moment, and the life of a thousand years: your life and the life
of all the visible and invisible beings in the world, are equal.
To destroy life, or to alter it, is impossible; for life is the
one thing that exists. All else, but seems to us to be."
--- gill http://www.allspirit.co.uk posted to AllspiritInspiration
"It's (the formless) arising in that
state - the background, the noise - foreground. But it's almost,
these natural phenomena like rain, it's almost as if space were
still coming through even the phenomenon. Somebody once put it
beautifully and said "God made everything out of nothing but
the nothingness still shines though." And so the
nothingness, the no-thing-ness, the one life beyond form shining
through this rain, too." - Eckhart Tolle
posted to Wisdom-l by Mark Scorelle
No, no, there
is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over the grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
~ Wendell Berry ~
(The Sabbath Poems)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/No_Going_Back.html Web archive of Panhala postings: www.panhala.net/Archive/Index.html
Digging In
Wendell Berry On Small Farms, Local Wisdom, And The Folly Of Greed
by Jeff Fearnside