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

 

Nonduality Highlights: Issue #4136, Sunday, January 16, 2011, Editor: Mark



The Story of a Story

Once upon a time there was a story

Its end came
before its beginning
And its beginning came
After its end

Its heroes entered it
After their death
And left it
Before their birth

Its heroes talked
About some earth about some heaven
The said all sorts of things

Only they didn't say
What they themselves didn't know
That they are only heroes in a story

In a story whose end comes
Before its beginning
And whose beginning comes
after its end

. - Vasko Popa, translated from the Serbo-Croat by Anne Pennington, from Staying Alive,edited by Neil Astley, posted to The_Now2




Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

Bertrand Russell, posted to Distillation




Ram Tzu has a question for you

You believe in yourself.
You believe in
The power of positive thinking.
You attend seminars
To gain control of your life.

Once again you become pregnant
With visions of limitless opportunities,
All yours for the grabbing.

You need merely to
Set your goals
Define your wants
Establish priorities.

Then you can march off
To claim all
That is rightfully yours.

Ram Tzu has a question for you...

What went wrong this time?

- Ram Tzu, from No Way for the Spiritually "Advanced," posted to AlongTheWay




By overlaying a subjective grid-work on the
world through your definitions and beliefs, you
vainly try to artificially divide the indivisible.

Beneath all of your ego-based interpretations,
however, the Absolute persists undisturbed and is
completely untouched by everything that you think,
feel, say and do.

Meanwhile, though, you're still struggling to
frantically write the story of your life on the watery
surface of an Eternal Ocean.

But you're using an icicle pen!

- Chuck Hillig, from Seeds for the Soul, posted to AlongTheWay




The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

- Stephen Jay Gould, posted to Distillation




Always be present, attentive, and ready in yourself

If a blow comes to you from Heaven,
be alert to a gift of honor after it;
for He is not the King to slap you
without giving you a crown
and a throne on which to rest.
The whole world is worth only a gnat's wing,
but a single slap may bring an infinite reward.
Slip your neck nimbly out of this golden collar
that is the world, and take the slaps that come from God.
The prophets suffered those blows on the neck,
and from that affliction they lifted their heads high.
But always be present, attentive, and ready in yourself,
youthful one, in order that He may find you at home.
Otherwise He will take back His gift of honor,
saying "I found no one there."

- Rumi, Mathnawi VI: 1638-1643, version by Camille and Kabir Helminski, from Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance, posted to Sunlight

top of page