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#4051 -Thursday, October 21, 2010 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
"Life passes like a flash of lightning
Whose blaze lasts barely long enough to see,
While earth and sky stand still forever.
How swiftly changing time flies across our face.
You who sit over your full cup and do not drink,
For what are you waiting?"
- Li Po
From the book: "The New Social Face of Buddhism,"
published by Wisdom Books
posted to Daily Dharma by Dainen
Kelley
Accept Everything
A well-known Japanese Rinzai Zen
master dropped by Sokoji to meet Suzuki
Roshi. After they chanted a sutra together, the visiting priest
asked to see a
sutra book on the altar. He looked at it, then suddenly exploded,
stamping his
foot on the floor and shouting, ''This is not Zen!" He tore
the book in two and
threw it on the floor.
Suzuki squatted down and picked up the pieces.
"Oh, this sutra book was
donated to the temple when there was a memorial
service for an old woman from a different sect," he
said. "We accept
everything here. We chant everything. We eat
everything." For a moment the
guest still looked angry, then Suzuki said, "let's go
have some tea." A
friendship began that continued as long as they were both
alive.
Suzuki Roshi, "Zen Is Right Here"
"From beginning-less time until now, all beings have
mistaken themselves for
phenomena and, having lost sight of their original mind, are
influenced by
phenomena, and end up having the scope of their observations
defined by
boundaries large and small."
- Surangama Sutra, Gautama Buddha
From the website: www.heartspace.org posted to Daily Dharma by Dainen Kelley
Be Your "Self"
The self is not a fixed, permanent
thing, but an ongoing narrative process. It’s
dynamic, it’s interactive, it’s engaged in moral
choices, it has goals, it has
aspirations, and it is also what allows us to function as a
society, as a plurality
of stories, selves that interact and share experiences, learning
from and
teaching one another. “Selfing” is simply the
evolutionary strategy that human
beings, probably for biological and adaptive reasons, have been
landed with.
There’s nothing deluded or neurotic about being a self in
that way. It’s
actually a very liberating perspective on the nature of the
individual.
Stephen Batchelor, "At the Crossroads"
You can't turn either towards
Consciousness
or away from Consciousness.
In fact, "you" can't even "turn" at all
because
your life is really only a melodramatic story that
Consciousness has been telling Itself.
And your only choice is whether or not you want
to believe in the validity of your story.
As usual, the ego wants to proudly say, "That's
my story and I'm sticking to it."
Actually, since you and your story arise
simultaneously, your story is also sticking to
you!
Without the historical framework of your time-
based story, though, "you" are really
"no-thing."
Actually, being "no-thing" might not be such a
bad idea.
- Chuck Hillig
posted to Along The Way
What Can I Say
What can I say that
I have not said before?
So I'll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.
Take your busy heart
to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.
~ Mary Oliver ~
(Swan)
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