To nondual awareness, everything is God- anger, joy, duality, personality, clouds, wonder, fear. There is only the Real, only the One, only the Mystery, outshining any language with which we attempt to describe it- and if we genuinely recognize this, there is no abandonment of our humanness, no employing of nondual teachings to separate out from the more difficult challenges of life, no turning away from the demands of relationship. It is easy to use nondual teachings to both distance ourselves from our humanity and to make a virtue of disengagement, leaving us clinging to our detachment. We may think we are following these teachings even as we have eviscerated them, stranding ourselves in superficiality. Where has the wildness, the rawness, the full-bloodied embodiment of spirituality gone? Must it be caged, drugged, homogenized, reduced to a squeaky-clean idealism for hungry seekers? Must we play vigilant zookeeper or valium supplier to spirituality’s edginess? Must we depersonalize and dehumanize it?…..Robert Masters
it’s like the strip mall of the heart….incapable of weeding out the nonsense, the dangerous conformity…..simply getting out of the head and into the living heart can cease the conceptualizing, the mantra-bending dogma, the post-modern view of goodness…..may we forget transcendence for a moment and actually live in our messy lives….
It could be said, I think, that we all try to choose peace, but that many move further and further away from it by evasion of the struggles and necessary conflicts of the human journey. What the one on the way to hell chooses all the time is peace for himself; rejection of everybody else except his own ego. The point about peace is that the true peace does not come until one has accepted boundaries and conflict–to the bitter end. That’s what the whole Christian story is about. That’s what the cross is……Helen M. Luke
I know my authentic voice
because it moves me like no other.
Emerging not from
the grooves of habit or belief,
but out of far left field,
or wherever the mystery
resides in me, it surprises
with honesty or shocks me
out of my complacency.
From the babble of competing
voices in my head, this one
stands out. I know my authentic
voice because integrity insists
on being noticed. It delivers
the experience of truth, the
take-my-breath-away instant
when presence fills every
cell of me with ‘Yes.’
….Danna Faulds
I think this is why I love Eckhart Tolle. He continually makes a point of saying yes. yes to the now, yes to our trials and successes. He talks of non dualism, without using labels. Yes, we must step out of ourselves and see the world we truly love in, not the one the ego shelters us with … Pain may be inevitable, but suffering is optional …
it’s truly a wild shake-up to really look differently at all of our preconceived notions…..to say, ‘ok, this is really bad, but I’m not going to move away from it’…..things shift in a different way…..not better, just more real…..I’m so grateful to know this choice is available, whether I can always do that or not……may you feel oodles of choices g.f.s….