Both the poetic and the literal translations have something to provoke reflection
Can you step back from your own mind, and understand all things?
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 10 (Mitchell translation)
[literally Can you comprehend everything without depending on knowing]
I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state.
Mary Oliver, Winter Hours
We in the West think that the mind is everything, but all Eastern practice is to get beyond the mind to the point of the silent witness, where you’re witnessing yourself, where you’ve gone beyond the ego, beyond the self. The Indian tradition rests on what the West has largely lost: that there are three levels. There is the level of the body and the level of the mind, which the Western world thinks is the end. But beyond the body is the spirit. It’s the Atman, the pneuma of St. Paul, another dimension where we go beyond the mind, the senses, and the feelings, and we’re aware of the transcendent reality.
And that is the goal of life, to get to that.
Bede Griffiths
We tend to focus on, and speak about the soul life of an individual in terms of spiritual comfort and deep nourishment, qualities which are a central, and abiding dynamic of its presence,
but the equally unsettling and disturbing quality about this strange, often wild and courageous faculty of belonging inside us we have come to name ‘the soul’ is its ruthless, and almost tidal wish to find its own way to a full union with the world.
The soul is a planner’s nightmare, the career counsellor’s central surprise, the biographer’s conundrum, an internal abiding spring that is both a source and a continual unstoppable flow, an internal stranger at the door of our outer life about to break everything apart and leave;
a pilgrim suddenly more in love with the horizon than its home; and most disturbingly, someone who is willing to fail, often spectacularly, at their own life rather than succeed drably, at someone else’s
David Whyte
Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things.
A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages.
And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Life is so short,
we should all move slowly.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Our time here is magic!
It’s the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique.
Ben Okri
Mindfulbalance 