Theos-Talk Archives (September 2002 Message tt00066)

Dear Mic,

Thank you very much for this beautiful and uplifting message. What 
powerful inspiriation it provides us, to remember our unity with all 
there is, our eternal gratitude for the endless chains of service of 
small and great lives that make our lives possible, and our 
tremendous opportunity in this crucial cycle of our evolution to 
return that service and sacrifice with every thought word and deed, 
always striving to make the Light of Truth a part of our daily lives. 


Adelasie

On 10 Sep 2002 at 15:56, Mic Forster wrote:

> Suppose you are sitting on a bench beside a path in a
> high mountain country. There are grassy slopes all
> around....Woods climb steeply on both sides of the
> valley, up to the line of treeless pasture; facing
> you, soaring up from the depths of the valley, is the
> mighty, glacier tipped peak, its smooth snow fields
> and hard-edges rock faces touched at this moment with
> soft rose colour by the last rays of the departing
> sun....
> 
> According to our usual way of looking at it,
> everything that you are seeing has, apart from small
> changes, been there for thousands of years before you.
> After a while....you will no longer exist, and the
> woods and rocks and sky will continue, unchanged, for
> thousands of years after you.
> 
> What is it that has called you so suddenly out of
> nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle
> which remains quite indifferent to you? ....For
> thousands of years men have striven and suffered and
> begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A
> hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this
> spot; like you, he gazed with awe and yearing in his
> heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you, he
> was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain
> and brief joy like you do. Was he someone else? Was it
> not you yourself? What is this self of yours? What was
> the necessary condition for making the thing conceived
> this time into you, just you, and not someone else?
> What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this
> "someone else" really have? ....What justifies you in
> obstinately discovering this difference - the
> difference between you and someone else - when
> objectively what is there is the same?
> 
> Looking and thinking in that manner you may suddenly
> come to see, in a flash, the profound rightness of the
> basic conviction in Vedanta: it is not possible that
> this unity of knowledge, feeling, and choice which you
> call your own should have sprung into being from
> nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather
> this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially
> eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all
> men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this
> sense - that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal,
> infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in
> Spinoza's pantheism. For we should then have the same
> baffling question: which part, which aspect are you?
> what, objectively, differentiates it from others? No,
> but, inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you
> - and all other conscious beings as such - are all in
> all. Hence, this life of yours that you are living is
> not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in
> a certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so
> constituted that it can be surveyed in one single
> glance....
> 
> ...now, today, every day [Mother Earth] is bringing
> you forth, not once, but thousands upon thousands of
> times, just as everyday she engulfs you a thousand
> times over. For eternally and always there is only
> now, one and the same now; the present is the only
> thing that has no end.
> 
> ======Erwin Schroedinger, pgs 96-7 (quoted in Quantum
> Questions, 1984, ed: Ken Wilber)
> 
> __________________________________________________
> Yahoo! - We Remember
> 9-11: A tribute to the more than 3,000 lives lost
> http://dir.remember.yahoo.com/tribute
> 
> 
> 
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to
> http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ 
> 
>