To experience the everyday sublime
one needs to dismantle piece by piece the perceptual conditioning that insists on seeing oneself and the world
as essentially comfortable, permanent, solid, and mine.
Stephen Batchelor, The Everyday Sublime
Somebody says something to you that is designed to hurt. Instead of going into unconscious reaction and negativity, such as attack, defense, or personal withdrawal, you let it pass right through you.
Offer no resistance. It is as if there is nobody there to get hurt anymore. In this way, you become invulnerable. You can still tell that person that his or her behavior is unacceptable, if that is what you choose to do. But that person no longer has the power to control your inner state.
You are then in your power – not in someone else’s, nor are you run by your mind. Whether it is a car alarm, a rude person, a flood, an earthquake, or the loss of all your possessions, the resistance mechanism is the same.
Eckhart Tolle
If you only walk on sunny days
you’ll never reach your destination.
Paulo Coelho
You must completely withdraw from the invisible pounding
and weaving of your ingrained ideas.
If you want to be rid of this invisible [turmoil],
you must just sit through it
and let go of everything
Hongzhi Zhengjue 1091–1157, Master in the Caodong school of Chan Buddhism
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
I have come to see the profound value of taking in the whole landscape of life and not rejecting or denying what we are given.
I have also learned that our waywardness, difficulties, and ‘crises’ might not be terminal obstacles. They can actually be gateways to wider, richer internal and external landscapes. If we willingly investigate our difficulties, we can fold them into a view of reality that is more courageous, inclusive, emergent, and wise – as have many others who have fallen over the edge.
Joan Halifax
Mindfulbalance 