Pointing To The Moon

we just are. we just are, and what happens just happens - Chuck Palahniuk

Nonduality isn't about special teachings and teachers. It's accessible to all because we are it. I've chosen a few quotes from fiction author Chuck Palahniuk (precisely because he's not typically called out as a "spiritual" teacher nor mystic) that resonate:

Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.

People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown. 

We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.

Light, In Honor of MLK Jr.

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that" - The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Gandhi on Love

Fear and love are contradictory terms. Love is reckless in giving away, oblivious as to what it gets in return. Love wrestles with the world as with the self and ultimately gains mastery over all other feelings. My daily experience, as of those who are working with me, is that every problem lends itself to solution if we are determined to make the law of truth and non-violence the law of life. For truth and non-violence are, to me, faces of the same coin. The law of love will work, just as the law of gravitation will work, whether we accept it or not. Just as a scientist will work wonders out of various applications of the law of nature, even so a man who applies the law of love with scientific precision can work greater wonders. - Mahatma Gandhi

UN Secretary-General on Steady Radiance

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason. - Dag Hammarskjod, former U.N. Secretary-General

Great Understanding of Love

"One finds love not by being loved, but by loving. We can never know love if we try to draw others to ourselves; nor can we find it by centering our love in them. For love is infinite; it is never ours to create. We can only channel it from its source in infinity to all whom we meet." - J. Donald Walters

Goethe on the Experiential

"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times, but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience. " - Goethe

Vietnamese Proverb

The Vietnamese proverb “O hien gap lanh” could be translated as “Love is reflected in love”. I think of it often.

(From story, My Life Enlarged).

Discovery #249

New Discovery #249 -
You must seek to love with the same intensity as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond

(from Wish Jar Journal via Thinking)

Yogi Tea on Love

Yogi Tea has little sayings on each tea packet. While sipping green tea this morning, I noticed this dangling from my cup...

Love is unchanging and limitless.

On Beauty

Thoughts about beauty assaulted me this weekend and I realized I can be fooled into thinking it is a physical concept...

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart. - Kahlil Gibran

Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all ye know on earth and all ye need know. - John Keats

In the movie Don Juan DeMarco, Marlon Brando is asking Johnny Depp how he attracts so many women. Depp, playing the role of Don Juan, replies (in Castillan accent):

By seeing beyond what is visible to the eye. Now there are those, of course, who do not share my perceptions, it is true. When I say that all my woman are dazzling beauties, they object. The nose of this one is too large; the hips of another, they are too wide; perhaps the breasts of a third, they are too small. But I see these women for how they truly are... glorious, radiant, spectacular, and perfect... because I am not limited by my eyesight. Women react to me in the way they do, Don Octavio, because they sense that I search out the beauty that lies within until it overwhelms everything else. And then they cannot avoid their desire, to release that beauty and envelope me in it.

How beautiful you are, my beloved, how beautiful! - Song of Songs 1:15