Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.~Walt Whitman
Good evening and welcome to Monday Group Meditation, we will be sitting from 7:30 to 10:00 PM EST. It is not necessary to sit for the entire extended time, which is set up to make it convenient for people in four North American Time Zones; sit for as long as you like and when it is most convenient for you.
Monday Group Meditation is open to everyone, believers and non-believers of all stripes who are interested in gathering in silence. If you are new to meditation and would like to try it for yourself, Mindful Nature gave a good description of one way to meditate in an earlier diary, copied and pasted below:
"It is a matter of focusing attention mostly. In many traditions, the idea is to sit and focus on the rising and falling of the breath. Not controlling it, but sitting in a relaxed fashion and merely observing experiences of breathing, sounds, etc. Be aware of your thoughts, but don't engage in them. When your mind wanders (it will, often), then return to focus on breath and repeat."
In the discussion threads of yesterday's excellent Dkos Sangha Weekly Open Thread diary about lila, I noted that a recent shift in my perception required me to adjust my comprehension of duality to allow for all the opposing poles being equally acceptable. Perhaps it is a good example of how experience builds on itself. Quite some time ago I noticed that in the peace of Oneness there was no opposition. That completely changed my relationship to duality and helped me to really understand the illusory nature of opposition.
However I still was attached to the idea that worldly conditions which are driven by ego were undesirable. It is a difficult concept for us to accept and even welcome everything. I wanted to elaborate on it here this evening in an attempt to evoke the experience, taking it beyond concept. But when I sat down to write about it, I discovered I didn't have any words for it. So then I thought I would try looking for a couple quotes to bracket the diary, hoping something I found would inspire me. What I found was a rich body of quotations that speaks to the wholeness which accepts and delights in all duality more articulately than I could ever hope to express it. Here is a selection:
Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other 'undesirable' side, the bad and the black. That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.~Chögyam Trungpa
If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death.~Pythagoras
Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating.~Louis Aragon
Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.~William Blake
It is usual to think of good and evil as two poles, two opposite directions, the antithesis of one another…. We must begin by doing away with this convention.~Martin Buber
In love all the contradictions of existence merge themselves and are lost. Only in love are unity and duality not at variance. Love must be one and two at the same time. Only love is motion and rest in one.~Rabindranath Tagore