Dear David, I was thinking about you… (in a good way).
Hopefully you can listen to hear, hopefully listening to her isn’t too squeaky or too fast.
My grandfather used to say: the last shirt has no pockets.
Interesting to see how invested we are in ways we are unaware.
I thought about you when she spoke about practices.
All of this as a gift, neither to diminish nor to aggrandize the assumed “me”.
Love,
Holger
Thank you for this. Such a beautiful and complete statement of the heart of nonduality! I recommend this for anyone with doubts.
As to the idea that practices are worthless, she disposes of this herself when she points out that “there is nothing to do” is just what the mind wants, to keep it going. Not only that, but she herself recommends a specific mental practice in this talk. She says, “so, when we rest naturally for short moments repeated many times as the essence of each perception, then more and more we realize the freedom that is the natural state.”
If she is not opposed to mental practice, then what is her point about practices? I think it is that any practice should be effortless and should point or end up in pure awareness. She doesn’t use these words, but I think this is exactly what she is saying.
So, as I’ve said before, there are many practices that point to pure consciousness, and they are worth trying. Even transcending, which can seem as a “doing” to one who is unfamiliar with it, works perfectly because it starts from the relative then extinguishes itself in the absolute. This is what is meant when Ramana Maharshi says, “The ‘I’ removes the ‘I’ yet remains the ‘I’.”