Various Pointers to Non-Duality

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There is no attainment and no cultivation
of original nature. You are Consciousness,
not a farmer! Why work for that which you
already are? Do not mentate, do not stir a
thought. Trying to get out of superimposed
bondage, which is the notion that you are
separate from Existence, you will land in
superimposed freedom.

- From "The Truth Is" by Sri H.W.L. Poonja

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"When you become more sensitive to the body you have the impression that the inhalation-exhalation is no longer localized. It is all around you. It is important to see how we live mainly in our heads. Think with your whole body, feel with your whole body.

In the whole feeling, the global sensation, you go into your room and touch your whole room. You go outside and touch the clouds, the trees, the water. You do not live in isolation.

In your radiation you are in communion with all things. In this expansion there is no place for the ego because the ego is a contraction. Love is expansion, a feeling of spaciousness. "

- Jean Klein

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This is from New Seeds of Contemplation, pg 226, in the chapter called "The Gift of Understanding"

"A door swings open in the center of our being and we seem to fall through it into immense depths which, although they are infinite, are all accessible to us; all eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact. Where already, supernatural instinct teaches us that the function of this abyss of freedom, which has been open within our midst, is to draw us utterly out of our own selfhood and into its own immensity of liberation."

- Thomas Merton

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The Trap of Meaninglessness

There are other traps that are inherent within this process of going from the initial glimpse of awakening to real abiding awakening. There are several of them that come up and again these traps or these cul-de-sacs, these delusions aren't inherent to awakening itself but they arise with the mind's relationship with the awakened view because the awakened view is so far beyond the mind that the mind truly can't contain it but the mind's inherent nature is to try to contain everything that it sees. And so one of these very common traps that people can get into is a sense of meaninglessness.

Now this can arise because from the stand point of reality we are free from the egoic desire to find meaning. We see that the ego's desire to find meaning in its life is actually a surrogate, a substitute for having a direct connection with life, for having the perception of 'you are life itself.' But if we don't feel that, if we don't know that, we don't experience that, then we need surrogates, we need something to stand in to fill the gap as it were. And as egos, what the ego uses is meaning, 'I'm trying to find the meaning in my life, what's the meaning to my life.' Only someone who is disconnected from life itself will seek meaning. Only someone that's disconnected from life will look for purpose. I'm not saying that people shouldn't look for meaning or shouldn't look for purpose. Actually they are probably wise strategies that are used to help people cope with life. But remember that these egoic yearnings for 'what's the meaning of my life?, what's the meaning of my existence?, what's the purpose of my existence?' are ultimately derived from a state where we have no real knowledge of what we are, where we're disconnected from our true nature. I don't mean actually disconnected, I mean unconscious of.

So when there's a true realization, when we wake up from the dream state, when we wake up from the ego, what is realized, part of the realization is the search for meaning is now no longer appropriate. When one has a direct connection with life, all of a sudden to find one's meaning, to find one's purpose seems to be a rather paltry thing, to be a small thing, to be insignificant. It's no longer really a drive in our life. The drive for meaning and purpose falls out of our life because we are literally in a different perspective. In a perspective where such things don't really exist or certainly they don't exist in the old way, they don't exist from the egoic standpoint.

Now the mind will perceive this, this truth, this truth that when we wake up from the dream state we see that the dream state is a dream state. How could a dream state have meaning? How could a dream state have purpose. It's a dream. And that's very true but as I say over and over, there's still a human being and there's still a human mind. And the mind is trying to make sense of all this. The mind is even trying to make sense of awakening itself. It's trying to make sense of the view of awakening. And as I have also said, for most people there's not a total disappearance of the ego, of that which is the experience of division. And so the mind is in relationship with the insights of reality, at times. And the mind will start to say, 'Oh God, there's no meaning!' And what's left of the ego will say, "There's no meaning! I now have no purpose or meaning! It's like you've seen too much of Reality to believe in purpose or meaning.

From "The End of Your World" - Adyashanti