How you do feel about this?

[aceofcups]

The only way you can keep you heart open is by living simultaneously on more than one plane of consciousness. When I was in India, there was a time in Bangladesh when things were just falling apart, and I wanted to take my VW and use it as an ambulance. My guru didn’t tell me to or not to, but he saw how agitated I was, and he said, “Ram Dass, don’t you see it’s all perfect?” and I said “Perfect?!” – I was outraged because people were dying and suffering.

My self-righteousness was outraged. How could it be perfect if people were being violated, and there is injustice?

Yet he would cry over the suffering, and he would do things to alleviate suffering, so I began to try to embrace the paradox of the planes of consciousness, in which there are inconsistencies. It involves the evolution of the individual soul through all kinds of learning experiences that involve suffering and death, but if you are looking at it through the eyes of your separateness, through your individual rational mind, it becomes a trap where you cannot see that it is all simultaneously perfect and it stinks.

ram das

[donq]

Hi Ace,

I do agree with Ram Das. Good post, thanks.
Okay let me start with some (not too long ago) quotes first:

Every psychological extreme secretly contains its own opposite, or stands in some sort of intimate and essential relation to it.
-Carl Jung

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
-F.Scott Fizgerald

I think the above quotes were also some kind of non-duality view. There was an ancient Chinese wisdom said, "We have to know when to stop". Why? Because:

When there is thought, there is knowledge,
But when there is knowledge, then you must stop.
Whenever the forms of the mind have excessive knowledge,
You lose your vitality.
(from Nei-Yeh or Inward/Inner training, around 4th century BCE)

So, how to stop? That's the question, isn't it? Hmm...I think Zen Buddhism gave some concrete answer. I'm sure we already heard this story (Platform Sutra of Hui-neng) many times, but I'd like to quote it here, to make the point.

Shen-hsiu:  

    The body is the bodhi tree,
    The mind is like a clear mirror.
    At all times we must strive to polish it,
    And must not let the dust collect.

Hui-neng:

    Bodhi originally has no tree,
    The mirror(-like mind) has no stand.
    Buddha-nature (emptiness/oneness) is always clean and pure;
    Where is there room for dust (to alight)?

Another edition of the Platform Sutra attributes the following verse to Hui-neng:

    The mind is the Bodhi tree,
    The body is the mirror stand.
    The mirror is originally clean and pure;
    Where can it be stained by dust?

Why is it like that? Why doing nothing would work? Because:

For whatever make something stop (take/grasp) in front of it,
it isn't situated in "this only" (or emptiness).
(But when) He knows that what is grasped doesn't exist.
The he realized that what grasp (grasper/grasping) doesn't exist either.

Anyway, I still wonder, is this just a way NOT to see it (and yes, we might getting calm because of that), like ostriches bury their heads in the sand and won't see the danger coming)? As non-duality is the result, not a means, is it not?