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#5084 - Tuesday/Wednesday, November 12-13, 2013 - Editor: Jerry Katz

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


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The latest Nonduality Network Talk Radio show may be enjoyed at http://nonduality.net/13november2013.mp3 

This show includes a recording of Chloe Goodchild chanting, followed by a conversation on mantras and chants. Understanding nonduality via duality. A beautiful confession from Gangaji. Then conversation on desire, longing, and prayer. Enthusiasm is the next topic. A clip from Swami Beyondananda. Also an audio of Coleman Barks reading Rumi. In between it all, other topics, considerations and humor.


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Memories of Now: On non-duality and the permanence of the present

Han van den Boogaard

http://non-dualitypress.org/products/memories-of-now


Han van den Boogaard is a Dutch psychologist,
writer and translator. He regularly publishes texts
on non-duality, and is chief editor of InZicht, the
only Dutch-language magazine on non-duality. He
has written several books, including a biography of
Ramana Maharshi, an anthology of Wei Wu Wei and
a collection of fifteen interviews with non-duality
teachers from the USA, the UK and the Netherlands.
Han is married and has two daughters. He is
currently working as a clinical psychologist at a centre
for deafblind people in the Netherlands.

Excerpt:

We develop into hollow men very gradually. The
period between complete innocence and the identity
crisis of the adolescent still contains countless moments
of undifferentiated Being. In my case it was the moving
of my family from a big city to the countryside that
threw me back into a new, unknown world waiting to
be discovered, allowing me to experience that phase
of childlike innocence all over again. To compensate
for the abrupt interruption of my regular life and the
loss of all my friends, my parents gave me a bike. It
had neither gears nor brakes. I didn’t know what to
do with it, but in all innocence I just mounted it and
got on my way. I pedalled around all day, from home
to school and from the farm of one friend to that of
the next. My ignorance was no obstacle to me. On the
contrary, it gave me endless pleasure to see, hear and
smell things for the first time: the kale growing by the
side of the road in winter, the dogs guarding the yards of
the farmers around the village, the tractor with which
I was allowed to plough the fields, the dens we boys
dug as deep in the ground as possible. I wanted to see
everything, experience everything, to know everything.
It was a hunger for life that was almost insatiable.

But the more I got to know, the more my original
innocence got lost. I had to search for it later on in my
life in faraway places where everything was new again.
But all the knowledge I had gathered by that time had
started to veil the simple happiness I used to know.
When I travelled to some exotic place, I would move
on after a couple of days, once again looking for this
not-knowing that had become so dear to me, but which
seemed to escape me faster and faster. But sometimes
I suddenly saw things as new and unknown, just as I
had when I was a child. Those moments were rare at
first, but they started to be more spacious as time went
by, until I became that space myself.

~ ~ ~

If the game of life has any purpose, it must be that it
enables us to recover the clarity, simplicity and openmindedness
that seem to be lost, or at least forgotten.

Playing this game enables Consciousness to expand in all
directions and grow clearer, until the point of complete
clarity is reached—the point in which all ego-related
sensations and perceptions dissolve. What remains is
a state in which we’re aware that everything we seem
to do and experience happens without there being
something or someone that does it or experiences it.
In that moment we look straight into the eyes of God.

Consciousness is the theatre in which the game of
life is playing. It creates the possibility of coming to
know itself as the only Self in all that appears, without
panicking or falling into despair when the drama of
life unfolds. For who is experiencing this drama? Does
someone in the audience have any reason to be grieved
when the actor on stage acts as if something terrible has
happened to him? Life is a drama, a play, a dream of
which Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita, says to Arjuna:
“In this dream you are allotted a certain role. You need
to play this role without being concerned about the
consequences. The only thing you can do is to play the
role to the best of your abilities.”

The real drama is our ignorance, which makes us
afraid of whatever is happening on stage. Voltaire, the
French writer and philosopher, knew this when he
wrote: “God is a comedian, playing for an audience that’s
too afraid to laugh.” God’s play is being performed in
a place that occupies no space, but contains all space
and all possibilities. From this ‘place’ we’re aware, with
great clarity, of the ways the drama plays itself out.

~ ~ ~

Memories of Now: http://non-dualitypress.org/products/memories-of-now


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Advaita Academy

Sanskrit Classes for Beginners - Class 96 - by Dr. Narasing Rao on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-QQBq2Pj0Q

Tune in to follow the series from the beginning - 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ6CLekQJO0&list=PLWjpkY4mU2RD8URCGJFG5nZQcb_PKTW8-

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