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

 

#4377 - Thursday, September 22, 2011 - Editor: Gloria Lee

The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights   

    Empty yourself of everything    

Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind become still.
The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.
The way of nature is unchanging.
Knowing constancy is insight.
Not knowing constancy leads to disaster.
Knowing constancy, the mind is open.
With an open mind, you will be openhearted.
Being openhearted, you will act royally.
Being royal, you will attain the divine.
Being divine, you will be at one with the Tao.
Being at one with the Tao is eternal.
And though the body dies, the Tao will never pass away.


       - Lao-tzu

Tao Te Ching
Translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English
by sshomi on Along The Way  

  Want to wake up fast? Turn up the heat by living constantly as if all people could
read your thoughts. Become translucent by destroying those beliefs that manifest
in your thoughts. Metaphorically I see enlightenment as one changing from solid
to liquid to gas - from matter to energy to light - from beliefs to thoughts to
awareness.
by Bill Talada in Nonduality Highlights group on Facebook    

     

  A Scott Morrison Teaching    

Years ago, there was a fellow on the Net teaching named Scott Morrison (with a
few books out, too, one of which is kicking around somewhere at home). At
some point, he died and pretty much all of his teachings just vanished from the
Net. I thought I'd offer one of his teachings here, and the opportunity to read a
few more, if interested -- they can be found here:  

http://scotmorrison.wordpress.com/  

I recall his basic teaching to be this:  

Open mind.   Open heart.  

Complete attention.  

No reservations.  

That's all.  

If you observe and listen very carefully and honestly, you will notice that rarely
does a moment go by without the arising of some sense of insufficiency, some
kind of feeling that “something is wrong with me,” or “something is wrong with
my life,” or perhaps even “something is wrong with the world.” Almost like
lightening, it is quickly followed by “I know what I want” — I know what will get
rid of this feeling of inadequacy and conflict — some material, financial, sexual,
spiritual, social, political, circumstantial, or psychological “thing” that will save me
from this uncomfortable feeling. That, in turn, is quickly followed by a massive
circus of mental scenarios and mutterings, of desires, hopes, expectations,
worries, fears, frustrations, and disappointments. Even if I get what I think I
want, the sense of completion and relief is inevitably only temporary. Why is it
like this?   

---  

What gets lost in the shuffle is the simple fact that all of it, the feelings of lack
and incompleteness, and the endless remedies to the situation, are nothing but
the play of memory and fantasy, the replaying of old mental video and sound bite
versions of “me” and “my life.” All of it is nothing but fragmented thought, and in
this there is no lasting relief, simply because thought is by nature fragmented and
incomplete. Thought doesn’t know what you are, and it doesn’t know what your
life is. It thinks it does with the same myopic arrogance, presumptuousness, and
judgmentality of the evening news, but it has no more understanding of the
whole organic interactional flow of life than television does. All thought can do is
search its memory banks of static images and repetitious opinions (for or
against), all of it accompanied by a vast deluge of emotional and physical
responses as well as replays, heavily edited by motive, of interactions with other
people and the environment. But there is no life and no love and no wisdom in
any of it. Why? Because it is an escape and an avoidance of what is.
---
No reservations.  If you watch and listen to it for awhile, you will observe the
whole history of humanity, our ignorance, dishonesty, and confusion, our
insensitivity, violence, and cruelty to each other. Perhaps it will deepen your
understanding and compassion for all sentient beings. It may be inevitable,
though, that at some point you get will fed up with it, realizing what a stale,
monotonous, meaningless distraction it is.  

At this point, there may be an opening. If you are ready to come to terms with
the simple fact that you do not know what you are, and you do not really know
what the universe is, or what your life is, then the amazing, delicate, subtle and
intricate truth of reality is free to reveal itself without bias. The constant
interaction and transformation of all things will be self evident, as well as the
infinite context in which it all happens. This is what you are! This is wonder and
awe and blessedness itself.  

-Scott Morrison-   by Tim Gerchmez on Facebook    

 

JEFF FOSTER: The Search for Home, The Search for Rest

   

Please enjoy an excerpt from Jeff Foster’s new book (which will be published in 2012) -  MK

"I long, as does every human being, to be at home, wherever I find myself."

~ Maya Angelou


The search for home goes so very, very deep in the human psyche. Throughout
all human history it has expressed itself in every single facet of our lives – in our
art, our music, our science, our mathematics, our literature, our philosophy, in
our quest for love, in our spirituality.

Male and female seek each other, try to complete themselves through sexual
union. We seek our ‘soul mates’, search for our ‘other halves’ who will complete
us. In our cosmic homesickness we seek union with God, with Spirit, with Nature,
with the guru. We buy houses together and magically transform them into
homes, and after a long, exhausting day at kindergarten, or at the office, we just
want to go home, back to mother, back to our loved ones, back to sleep, back to
the cosmic womb. We populate landmasses, create countries, and call them our
homeland, our motherland, our fatherland. We fight and die to protect our
homeland – the land that we love, the land our ancestors were born in and died
in. We wander in the wilderness for a thousand years and long for the promised
land, for our heaven on earth, for our Jerusalem.

Characters in novels, in plays, in movies, journey far away from home, discover
who they really are and return home, somehow changed, somehow the same.
We love our movies, our television shows, to end with a tearful homecoming, a
tearful reunion, and the story of the one who never came home haunts us like
anything. In The Wizard of Oz, perhaps our most beloved movie of all time, a
young girl leaves her colourless home, goes on an incredible journey, meets
various facets of herself, and returns to the same place – but now she sees what’s
really there. In many Disney musicals, often the main character, feeling like an
outcast in their own home, will sing a song about their longing for adventure, for
love. Something calls them away from home, but in the end, they return home,
or they find a new home, their true home, their true place in the world. It has
been suggested that on the most basic level every story, every myth, shares this
common structure – ending with the hero’s return. As children, we are homesick
when we are away from home for too long, away from the ones we love.

  read the rest: http://nondualityamerica.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/jeff-foster-the-search-for-home-the-search-for-rest/   from Non-duality America Blog

top of page