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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #4305, Sunday July 10, 2011





There is, within each of us,
a level of Satisfaction
which exists beyond all circumstance.

Discover THIS,
and you will experience
the peace that passes all understanding.

- Metta Zetty




Do not sit long with a sad friend.
When you go to a garden,
do you look at thorns or flowers?
Spend more time with roses and jasmine.

- Rumi, version by Coleman Barks, from Open Secret, posted to AlongTheWay




Before you speak, ask yourself, is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence?

- Sai Baba, posted to Distillation




It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

- Antoine de Saint Exupéry




When I was about six years old I received the essential bodhichitta teaching from an old woman sitting in the sun. I was walking by her house one day feeling lonely, unloved and mad, kicking anything I could find. Laughing, she said to me, "Little girl, don't you go letting life harden your heart."

Right there, I received this pith instruction: we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.

- Pema Chodron




A disciple is like a new moon,
in reality no different than the full moon:
its apparent imperfection is a sign of gradual increase.
Night by night the new moon gives a lesson in gradualness:
with deliberation it says, "O hasty one,
only step by step can one ascend to the roof."
A skillful cook lets the pot boil slowly;
the stew boiled in a mad hurry is of no use.

- Rumi, Mathnawi VI:1208-1212, version by Camille and Kabir Helminski, from Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance, posted io Sunlight




The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice -
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do -
determined to save
the only life you could save.

- Mary Oliver




The state we call realization is simply being oneself, not knowing anything or becoming anything. If one has realized, he is that which alone is, and which alone has always been. He cannot describe that state. He can only be That. Of course, we loosely talk of Self-realization for want of a better term.

That which is, is peace. All that we need do is to keep quiet. Peace is our real nature. We spoil it. What is required is that we cease to spoil it.

- Ramana Maharshi

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