Being silent for me doesn’t require being in a quiet place, and it doesn’t mean not saying words. It means “receiving in a balanced, noncombative way what is happening”. With or without words, the hope of my heart is that I will be able to relax and acknowledge the truth of my situation with compassion.
Sylvia Boorstein, That’s funny, you don’t look Buddhist
We are in the midst of one of the most profound cognitive shifts in our intellectual history, moving from a “deep attention” to a “hyper attention” society, to quote Duke University professor Katherine Hayles. She defines “deep attention” as the cognitive preference for input from only a single information stream, to be engaged for an extended period. “Hyper attention,” by contrast, is marked by a hunger for a high level of stimulation and a desire to shift rapidly among different information streams. Surfing the Internet while IM’ing and watching a YouTube video, all with music playing in the background: Yes. Reading 100 pages of a novel in one sitting or writing a term paper: No. Evidence of this shift can be found just about everywhere in our culture…. And so one must ask: Where in our culture do we encourage sustained thinking and provide a quiet, reflective space to ponder, reflect and develop ideas?
Vanessa Silberman, Mindfulness, Focusing the Mind’s Eye in the Digital Age, Dot Magazine.
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments,
but what is woven into the lives of others.
Pericles
The art of awareness of God, the art of sensing his presence in our daily lives cannot be learned offhand.
God’s grace resounds in our lives like a staccato. Only by retaining the seemingly disconnected notes comes the ability to grasp the theme.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
We gradually cut through the habit of identifying with each emotional wave that passes through our awareness. We can be angry, jealous, or scared without having to act on those emotions or let them take over our lives. All too often, the emotions we experience, along with the thoughts and behaviors that accompany them, become part of our internal and social story lines. Anger, anxiety, jealousy, fear, and other emotions become part of who we believe we are, creating what I would call a “greasy” residue, like the oily stuff left on a plate after eating greasy food. If that residue is left on the plate, eventually everything served on that plate starts to taste alike; bits of food start to accumulate too, stuck to layers and layers of greasy residue. All in all, a very unhealthy situation!
When we allow space into our practice, though, we begin to see the impermanent nature of the thoughts and feelings that arise within our experience — as well as of the conditions, over many of which we have no control. That greasy residue doesn’t build up, because there’s no “plate” for it to cling to. If we can allow some space within our awareness and rest there, we can respect our troubling thoughts and emotions, allow them to come, and let them go. Our lives may be complicated on the outside, but we remain simple, easy, and open on the inside
Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Allow for Space
This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know:
that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness
Mary Oliver
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