Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nonduality Highlights each day
How to submit material to the Highlights
#3398 - Wednesday,
December 31, 2008 - Editor: Gloria Lee
Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Best wishes to all for the new year: "
May all beings be happy. May they be
free from suffering. May they be at peace."
The great path has no gates
Thousands of roads enter it
When you pass through this gateless gate
You walk the universe alone
Mumon
Spaciousness and Freedom
The degree of love we manifest determines
the degree of spaciousness and freedom we can bring to life's
events.
Imagine taking a very small glass or water and putting into it a
teaspoon of salt. Because of the small size of the container, the
teaspoon of salt is going to have a big effect on the water.
However, if you approach a much larger body of water, such as a
lake, and put into it the same teaspoonful of salt, it will not
have the same intensity of impact, because of the vastness and
openness of the vessel receiving it. Even when the salt remains
the same, the spaciousness of the vessel receiving it changes
everything.
We spend a lot of our lives looking for a feeling of safety or
protection--we try to alter the amount of salt that comes our
way. Ironically, the salt is the very thing that we cannot do
anything about, as life changes and offers us repeated ups and
downs. Our true work is to create a container so immense that any
amount of salt, even a truckload, can come into it without
affecting our capacity to receive it.
-- Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness
We rarely hear the inward music
but we're all dancing to it nonetheless
- Rumi
quoted in
Perfect Brilliant Stillness
David Carse
posted to Wisdom-l by Mark Scorelle
The seeds of His love blossom in every
heart.
The sounds of His flute fill every celebration.
Everyone thinks that he sings and dances
But no -
He is the only one singing.
He is the only one dancing.
- Rumi
posted to Along The Way
Paul Brunton
The strange result of going deeper and
deeper into the Real is that silence falls more and more as a
curtain over his private experience and private thought. The
strong urgency of communication which the missionary and the
reformer feel, the strong need of expression which the artist and
the writer have, trouble him no longer. The inner voice is
tight-lipped, or speaks to him alone. He begins to see how much
apostolic utterance is merely the overflow of personal emotion,
how much artistic achievement is motivated by personal ambition,
how much spiritual service is simply another phase of the ego
adoring and serving itself. Thomas Aquinas came to such an
insight late in life and he, the author of so many books
dedicated to the glory of God, could never again write another
line. Those who stand on the outside may consider such a severe
restraint put upon oneself to be harsh and fanatical, perhaps
even antisocial. But it is safe to say that all these critics
have never tracked the ego to its secret lair, never had all
movement of their individual will stopped by the divine
Stillness.
— Notebooks Category 24: The Peace within You > Chapter
4: Seek the Deeper Stillness > # 193
posted to Wisdom-l by Mark Scorelle
The Winter of Listening
No one but me by the fire, my hands burning
red in the palms
While the night wind carries everything away outside.
All this petty worry while the great cloak of the sky grows dark
and intense round every living thing.
What is precious inside us does not care to be known
by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.
What we strive for in perfection is not what turns us
into the lit angel we desire.
What disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need.
What we hate in ourselves is what we cannot know
in ourselves but what is true to the pattern does not need
to be explained.
Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born.
Even with the summer so far off I feel it grown in me
now and ready to arrive in the world.
All those years listening to those who had nothing to say.
All those years forgetting how everything
has its own voice to make itself heard;
All those years forgetting how easily you can belong
to everything simply by listening.
And the slow difficulty of remembering
how everything is born from an opposite
and miraculous otherness.
Silence and winter has led me to that otherness.
So let this winter of listening be enough
for the new life I must call my own.
~ David Whyte
posted to Daily Dharma
From the book, "The House of Belonging," published by
Many Rivers Press
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/9780962152436/angelinc<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/9780962152436/angelinc