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#3566 - Wednesday, June 17, 2009 -
Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
At the Brink of
Truth
Every breathing moment of our lives presents us with the possibility of awakening to wisdom. Every action, every thought we generate leads us constantly to the brink of discovering our true selves.
–Ajahn Sumano Bhikkhu with Emily Popp, from Meeting the Monkey Halfway (Weiser)
http://davidgodman.org/interviews/rs1.shtml
DG: I would say that Self-realization is what remains when the mind irrevocably dies in the Heart. The Heart is not a particular place in the body. It is the formless Self, the source and origin of all manifestation. Self-realization is permanent and irreversible. I also suspect that it is quite rare. Many people have had glimpses or temporary experiences of a state of being in which the mind, the individual "I", temporarily stops functioning, but I don't think that there are many people in the world in whom the "I" has died.
Papaji used to say, "What comes and goes is not real. If you have had an experience that came and went, it was not an experience of the Self because the Self never comes and goes."
I think this is an interesting comment. If it is true, it means that most waking-up experiences are merely new states of mind. It is only when the mind dies completely, never to rise again, that the Self really shines as one's own natural state.
The terms "glimpses" and "waking-up experiences" that you refer to are temporary. They come and they go because the '"I" itself has not been permanently eradicated. A powerful Guru may be able to give a glimpse of the Self to just about anyone, but it is not within his power to make it stick. If the person has a mind that is full of desires, those desires will eventually rise again and cover up the glimpse.
posted to Wisdom-l by Mark Scorelle
When all thoughts vanish into the
Stillness, the ego-personality vanishes too. This is Buddha's
meaning that there is no self, also Ramana Maharshi's meaning
that ego is only a collection of thoughts.
— Notebooks, Paul Brunton
Is not ‘I am’ also a thought?…The egoless ‘I
AM’ is ‘not a thought. It is Realisation. The meaning
or significance of ‘I’ is God. The experience of ‘I
am’ is to ‘BE STILL’. --Ramana Maharshi, Talks 226
When you realize that
there is no method, no system, no mantra, no teacher, nothing in
the world that is going to help you to be quiet, when you realize
the truth that it is only the quiet mind that sees, then the mind
becomes extraordinarily quiet. It is like seeing danger and
avoiding it. In the same way, seeing that the mind must be
completely quiet, it is quiet.
Now, the quality of silence matters. A very small mind can be
very quiet, it has its little space in which to be quiet; that
little space, with its little quietness, is the deadest thing -
you know what it is. But a mind that has limitless space and that
quietness, that stillness, has no center as the 'me', the
observer, is quite different. In that silence there is no
observer at all. That quality of silence has vast space, it is
without border and intensely active; the activity of that silence
is entirely different from the activity which is self-centered.
If the mind has gone that far (and really it is not that far, it
is always there if you know how to look), then perhaps that which
man has sought throughout the centuries - God, truth, the
immeasurable, the nameless, the timeless - is there. Without your
invitation, it is there.
--J. Krishnamurti, The Flight
of the Eagle - 42
posted to Open Awareness by Ben
Hassine
Peter Dzubian author of Consciousness
is All on Never Not Here
http://www.viddler.com/explore/ClearSightTV/videos/111/
http://www.viddler.com/explore/ClearSightTV/videos/120/
interesting approach!
posted to Wisdom-l by Mark
Scorelle