Good love vibes and nulification of ' universe?'

[Guest guest]

> One cannot nullify the validity of the world until one is realised.

Well, Im hoping that 'nulification of the universe' means nulification of dual experience.

Since I have my Douglas Harding books out, perhaps the list will

patiently bear with me when I quote more from his words and view.

I'll try to make it short. It was worth it to me to read this story.

Recognition of essence of mind, emptiness and voidness is only half

the story and the easy part. I'm still wrestling with what this story

is about. Love Joyce

Harding tells the story of himself; "...a thirty-three year old

soldier in India during the Second World War, on leave in the

Himalayas, made for him what was an all-important discovery as he

literally took a fresh look at himself.

"What I found was trouser legs terminating at the top of the

picture in a pair of shoes, sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of

hands, and a shirtfront terminating at the bottom of the picture in

-nothing whatsoever. Certainly not a head. It took me no time at all

to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been,

was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a

nothing that found room for everything - room for that decapitated

body-trunk, for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, the sky...I had

lost a head and gained a world...There arose no questions, no

reference beyond the experience itself, but only peace and quiet joy

and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden."

"Then, the soldiers leave having expired, he returned to Calcutta.

Here it was no rare thing for the destitute to die unattended in the

Calcutta streets, but now there was a famine and they were dying in

hundreds and thousands, and many of the living were walking or

prostrate skeletons -little children included. At the door of his

quarters he had to step over pleading forms.

Of course he felt pity and gave something. But he remained

uninvolved, detached, cool. It wasn't a deliberate withdrawal from

the suffering around him, a conscious retreat into the safety and

perfection of the Emptiness he'd so recently discovered. All the

same, he was really running away from the stress and distress out

there to their Absence right here at the Centre. As if he could! As

if his new found refuge were by itself the answer to the world's

catastrophes! It's true he had, with well-founded relief and delight,

read correctly the first half of the story, the piece about absolute

detachment, the easy part. The hard part about absolute involvement,

he had yet to take in and take to heart. Yes, he had made a good

start. For the present he was able to look down at these emaciated

forms with an equanimity that was deeply unreal and, one has to say,

appalling. The reason I feel free to make such a comment is that

soldier was me." (Harding)

"Some twenty years after that wartime experience, I as in India

again, staying at he ashram of Ananadamayi Ma, a Bengali saint and

seer with a following of millions. Through an interpreter (she spoke

no English, I spoke no Bengali) I was priviledged to have several

conversations with her on the subject of the line 'I bow to thee, I

bow to thee, O Goddess who art the Consciousness in all creatures,"

that happened to move me greatly.

Two events in that ashram stand out in my memory. One was when at

our parting, Ma gave me the shawl from her head with the words: 'I am

you, I am you!' The other was when a Rani, an Indian princess whose

son had just died, came to see Ma. For a long while she comforted

that bereaved mother. Seers have something of a reputation for

detachment. Well, Ma was weeping as copiously and for as long as her

visitor was.

Among the saints recorded words are some that might have been

spoken to me personally at the time of that Bengali famine:

"If, after coming down from the state of contemplation, you are

capable of behaving as before, you have not yet been

transformed...People come to me and tell me of their sons and

daughters having got into a car and driven away, without looking up

to see if they are weeping. They are quite unmoved by their parent's

grief. You see, this is precisely what it is like at a certain stage

on the Path...You feel: "Those whom I believed to be my very own are

merely related to me by flesh and blood. What is that to me?"...But

later, when you have become detached even from detachment, there is

no problem of detachment or non-detachment. What is, is THAT."

Anandamayi Ma was neither attached to nor detached from that mother

and her grief. She *was* both. Her messge for her devotees, as for

me then and ever since that memorable occasion, was and is, I AM

YOU."

Head Off Stress-D.E. Harding