Nonduality"
Nonduality.com Home Page

Click here to go to the next issue

Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nonduality Highlights each day

How to submit material to the Highlights

#3326 - Tuesday, October 21, 2008 - Editor: Jerry Katz

The Nonduality Highlights


The Enlightenment Secret

You are not a separate being. You are Being, and never separate.  This is the Enlightenment, the nondual awareness, the happiness, in which all apparent things consist. It is the very Being of you.

How to "see" that you are nondual awareness?

Your experience confirms this at every moment.  Look at it with openness, without rehearsing a worldview you might have learned in school or on TV:

The world, body, and mind appear as sensations, feelings and thoughts. These appearances are all arisings in awareness. The person does not see these arisings. Rather, the person is made up out of these arisings, including the supposed act of seeing. If these arisings are investigated, it can be seen that they do not reach outside themselves. They cannot point to each other, touch each other or contain each other. It is only memory that suggests that there has ever been another arising. But memory itself is nothing more than an arising. It cannot truly point backwards or forwards to anything, for during this apparent pointing, there are no objects to be pointed to. There is truly nothing in experience that establishes that there has ever been anything other than THIS. There is no evidence that there were ever even two arisings. If there cannot be two arisings, how can there be even one? What is left? Awareness, your true nature.

--Greg Goode

http://heartofnow.com    


   

Gaining Confidence in Awareness

John Astin

http://www.integrativearts.com/blog/?p=193

I recently heard a phrase which I believe comes out of the Tibetan non-dual tradition of Dzogchen, “gaining confidence in awareness.” That is the sense of what has been happening here and I believe, happening for many of the people I know who are engaged in this kind of investigation and inquiry. Awareness is first recognized to be the ever-present ground and source of all that is, the light of wakefulness that illumines all experience, the emptiness that dances as all form. But for most people, there is not initially a deep and abiding confidence in its ever-present nature. And so, seeking for it, seeking for something else, returns in all its many forms. It is in many ways, understandable that we would seemingly lose sight of the ever-present nature of awareness, for the simple reason that awareness cannot be seen. It is what is SEEING. But you see, the seeing is always happening, is it not? Something is always being seen, even if in certain moments, what is being seen is the sense that nothing is being seen or that what is being seen is somehow not quite enough. But, it doesn’t much matter what is there - pleasant, unpleasant, clear, confused, ordinary, extraordinary, a sense of remembering or forgetting, opening or closing - the seeing is always there at the center. It cannot be absent for everything that appears, appears to the seeing. Everything is illumined by that dark and invisible light. And, even more, everything IS none other than that light, the seen none other than the seeing. The seeing outshines everything for it IS everything. Never absent. Always present. And always, only ever now…

May we all gain confidence in this Friend we will never see, this awakeness that is beyond all points of view even as it shines in and through and as them all.

In the words of Adyashanti, “You are neither free nor bound, but ever-present.”

In Gratitude and Love…

John Astin

http://www.integrativearts.com/blog/?p=193

   


Peter and Vicki  

~ ~ ~  

Even in a stiff gale,
Even with cloudless skies,
Many fathoms down, it's dark,
Sea depths are always calm.
Whales know this,
They visit the surface, but live deep.

Pete  

~ ~ ~

Hi, Pete...this is lovely...

and reminded me of an essay on my Fishpond Page. Here 'tis...

Today found me frolicking on the surface of my life. On a hot July day, I rose from the ocean depths to the clear blue of the surface. I parted company with the water and briefly played with the shore.

I responded to human love and companionship, a great treasure in itself. But nothing compares to the depths of spirit where we live and move and have our being. We are creatures of the deeps of God. But He allows us moments and hours of sheer pleasure in the company of friends.

I saw the white, white sands of personality and picked up a precious sand dollar called "Being Understood." There is nothing quite like putting a perfect sand dollar in your pocket, is there? I touched the silken petals of the human heart beating in time with mine.

All too soon it ended and I returned to the solitary sounds of sonar and splash. I had made a momentary break with Oneness to look into the mirror of daily life. A disco ball of joy flashed on my brief time ashore. But I don't belong on shore after all. A brief return suffices to remind me of my mission here on earth. I will leave you with the mystery of what it is, for it is the same as yours.

http://www.vickiwoodyard.com/fishpond.htm

top of page