The Totality of Experience - Shinshu Roberts

 ...As soon as we return to the totality of this moment's complete
expression, responding to the whole of our situation, we are
not caught by anything.  Even though we are still subject to
the repercussions of our past actions, we are free to
respond skillfully in the present moment/situation.

If we have been rude to someone in the past and that person
is wary of us [or if they have been rude to us], our total
participation in this moment of meeting that person will not
necessarily take away the effects of our past meeting.  What
it will do is free us to respond skillfully in this situation.
Since we are not caught by "piled up" or overlapping
experiences, we are freed to enact the new paradigm of 
[seeing the whole of the situation] and being present for
the next opportunity...

Holding on to a past mistake will often hinder your ability
to respond skillfully in the present, although you still file
away your mistake and make adjustments.

Our understanding of self can become a fixed idea of
accumulated ["piled up"] traits and experiences.  The self
 is both independent and the totality of all being-time.  We are
no-self and a particular self at the same time, caught by
neither and more than both.  [This] realization is not
predicated upon a particular set of circumstances.
Realization is present in each moment.
Realization is each moment.

Shinshu Roberts
from an article on Dogen in Insight Journal
from Barre Center for Buddhist Studies

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

No Secret of Life - Kiserian

 There is no secret of life for you to find.  It makes me smile
when you talk of finding your true nature or losing your ego
or seeing that you are not separate.  That you have no self or
know you never had a self.  I always want to ask who is it
that knows what they are not?  All your focus is on what does
not exist.  And then you say this is it, or talk of what is, or
your talk of consciousness or awareness.  Does it not seem
funny that you tell me you no longer believe in concepts and
then use a flood of concepts to tell me that?  You are like a
river saying it is finished with water.

You trade one set of concepts for another.  All because you get
a little peek into what we always saw, felt and lived. 
Not knowledge.  Not ideas.  Simply life.
It needs no name.  There is no concept that your little mind
can invent to express everything that goes far beyond our
human experience.  You are like people who love playing
word games.  You can always beat me at a word game.  You
are the masters of using words to get what you want. Even
when you say that what you want is beyond words.  If it was
really beyond words, how could you speak of it?

I am not here to say you are wrong. 
I am not playing the game with you.  

I watch you play a tug of war with words over who is saying
it the best, badmouthing others and then you say you do not judge!
I am only pointing out that when you have the need to assert
what you believe, even if you never call it a belief, you are still
not seeing what I am talking about.  For it is not seen, not even
felt in the way we think of feelings.

You are trying to use words to say what you perceive.  But the
words you use take anyone listening away from life.  You can
never get outside of life to look at life.  To say nothing is real
creates an imaginary line between real and false.  And denying
what is felt and experienced is what Western philosophers have
always done.  Do you not see yourself falling into the very same
trap?

When you say it is all love, that may be as close as you can get.
I only wonder why that is never enough for you...

Kiserian - from Kenya
speaking of the concept of Non-duality

with thanks to No Mind's Land

see videos of her speaking here

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering