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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3346, Sunday, November 9, 2008, Editor: Mark
This is an invitation to sit in wonderment, or to sit in awe, in
cluelessness, in being willing to take every certainty that the
mind holds and let it be turned into a wondering... as though
this were your first moment on Earth, innocent of all the mind's
cleverness and assumptions... just simple being. And every day,
we treat being as beside the point. Here, this being is the
point! It's not skipped over on our way somewhere... just fully
embraced and explored. What is it like to simply be?
Let everything be just as it is... just resting unprotected and
simple, innocent, offered to the moment... When we enter the
moment wide awake, we enter the moment openly, leaving all that's
known behind. We enter the radical new. We enter what's alive,
what's unborn. We open ourselves to being informed and moved by
something beyond the mind.
With your eyes closed, it's rather tricky to try to find the
boundary between body and space. There's just this field of
awareness and these dancing sensations - the inner and the outer
environment coming together in one big dance of sensation... all
environment... what's inside-what's outside - just little
sensation blips on this wide screen of awareness. So let yourself
forget who you think you are... what you think you are... all
that you've figured out... to just enter the newness of this
moment, the freshness of sitting here not knowing, just exploring…
not figuring out, just feeling, sensing, resting, imagining
yourself to be this wide screen of awareness. Let yourself rest
as space... as a night sky... as an ocean...
If you let everything in the mind be up for re-evaluation, where
would you be? What would you be.. Just here, lost in God. No
past.. no future, just opening and opening in this clueless depth
of now.
All of the things that drove us from here come calling when we
simply dare to be here. Just like Jesus in the desert or Buddha
under the tree, waiting out the temptations and the illusions if
we just dare to be. It can take a while for the whole body to get
the message that everything's welcome, that all burdens can be
laid down. All the tiny identifications and the not-enoughs can
come dancing in this lit space. And we just let them dance. No
matter what sensations in the body come with them, they are not
real. They are what drive us to keep doing, to get somewhere.
Drive us towards our deathbeds in this wild bunch of doing called
a life.
Wherever the friction is for you between the song of your heart
and the fear of your conditioning, that's where God is growing
through you.
No amount of strategized doing can improve on how the Holy wants
to move us. No amount of fighting what is actually makes anything
better.
When deliciousness is here, when we know ourselves as nothing, as
resting, why go anywhere else? It's done. Whether it starts up
again or it doesn't is another question, but who cares? Don't
fall for the bait of the mind. Give your whole being to NOW.
We see the wind blowing the trees sideways, and do we say
"You jerk. Stop blowing so hard?" It's really the same
as attributing anything to or evaluating the fictitious one based
on how the flow of life is going. Some people take identification
to that level--they look out and the sky is cloudy, and they say,
"See? Nothing ever goes right. I'm a shit." What else
can I personally attribute to this one that doesn't exist? When
we get no ownership,, when we get that we have no control, that
we can't make it go faster or better because we actually aren't,
Ah! That's like the biggest vacation. Just hang the whole thing
on a hook and go about riding the flow, you know? Like, why not?
- Jeannie Zandi, from her monthly newsletter, which you can elect
to recieve by emailing info@jeanniezandi.com
Storms, inevitably arising
The ocean seems such a long way off,
high in the mountain drainage.
Boulders sit for centuries
beside the stream,
unmoved by its perfect song.
So many days and nights,
circles spun 'round the brilliant sun,
seasons of change and return,
change and return.
Yet even massive rocks
so sure and solidly standing,
fall before the irresistible movement
of storms inevitably arising.
They spill into the flow,
they hear the water's song - finally!
and are drowned in it.
Now they are only movement,
sometimes almost imperceptible
yet irrevocably drawn -
bumping against one another,
becoming smooth
like cobbles
like pebbles
like dust
dissolving in the current.
- Gangaji