O human, see then the human being rightly:
the human being has heaven and earth and the whole of creation in itself, and yet is a complete form,
and in it everything is already present, though hidden.
Hidlegard of Bingen
Making choices
We seem to get daily reminders as to how our current society – and those who have positions of responsibility in it – seems to have lost its connection to any inner sense of values.
It is no measure of health
to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
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The calm underneath
Universal Mind is like a great ocean,
its surface ruffled by waves and surges
but its depths remaining forever unmoved.
The Lankavatara Scripture, c.350 AD
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Why awareness is needed
It’s hard to tell the difference between sea and sky,
between voyager and sea.
Between reality and the workings of the heart.
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on The Shore
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A steady orientation
I find myself more and more teaching what seems most essential; to help people access intelligent and comfortable awareness. If this awareness becomes a steady orientation, it’s possible to live and grow in this personal world; here is a sense of safety with its fundamental goodwill. The tricky detail being that it is not personal; it’s before the personal conditions arise.
And this means that the sources of the programs and attitudes that become a person get revealed: dis-ease, restlessness and having to do something, or feeling guilty and inadequate that one isn’t doing (or in fact being) whatever it is that one should be – while not knowing what that is. Not that any of that is your fault. Essentially this dukkha (suffering) is not personal, not specific; and it isn’t resolved by doing anything other than tackling its program. It’s non-specific because its source is the pressurised space of one’s unsettled awareness. That then colours everything that the personality forms out of.
Ajahn Sucitto
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Stay in the middle of it
Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. It’s the kind of place we usually want to avoid. The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint. The challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid.
Pema Chödrön, The In-Between state
