Nectar #7: The Excellence of Sacrifice and Self-Effort

Babaji Bob Kindler · Annapurna Sarada · Swami Vivekananda · Rabbi Michael Lerner · Kenneth Wapnick

Feb 2002 · Nectar of Non-Dual Truth Buku 7 · Sarada Ramakrishna Vivekananda Associations

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The Spring issue of Nectar of Nondual Truth is duly and devoutly dedicated to sacrifice and spiritual disciplines. How do these two timeless principles relate to each other? In many ways, but the three most obvious are on cosmic, collective and individual levels of existence. It is the last of these that is the focus of Nectar’s philosophical and religious spotlight herein, for in the personalized body/mind mechanism lies all the secrets for divine life and realization of our inherent perfection.

Many do not believe in the innate divinity of mankind. Some are verily antagonistic to the very idea. Others, who have even allowed such a sententious thought room in their minds, only default to a position of eternal separation wherein they admit human beings capable of doing good but judge them all intrinsically fallible by nature. Thus they conceive human beings as ever disparate or dissimilar with God, who is perceived as being somewhere outside of them or, at best, only occasionally entering into the human condition under miraculous conditions. Thankfully, there are also the nondualists, who have experienced indivisible Awareness within themselves and have rendered even this universe blissful by gazing through the “Single Eye of Truth.” Jesus of Nazareth was one such, stating, “I and my Father are One.” Out of the antiquitous Treta Yuga, Sri Ram was another: “The embodied being is actually all-pervading and endless. It is one without a second, unaffected by anything, eternal, pure, and of the nature of Consciousness.” Lord Buddha of India took the nondual view: “Freed from reckoning by the material shape, feeling, perception, or consciousness, is the Tathagata; he is deep, immeasurable, unfathomable, as is the great ocean.” From among the greatest of Christian mystics, Meister Eckhart explains: “Those who would see God must see as God sees.” More currently, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa of Bengal states: “When the mind merges in Brahman the individual soul and the Supreme Soul become one. The aspirant goes into samadhi. His consciousness of the body and knowledge of the world disappears. He does not behold the many anymore. His reasoning stops.”

Included in the pages of Nectar’s Spring issue are articles to inspire us on towards practice and attainment of all things noble that we cherish and seek after. From unassailable truths to heartfelt devotions, from fervid aspirations to unwavering probity, from refined emotions to words of well-considered reformation, from sedulous and sincere striving to the selfless sacrifice it entails — it is all here in Nectar. May all beings imbibe the nectar of nonduality, and feel the salubrious effects of its revivifying presence.