Month: August 2012

Forget climbing

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A woman said to Suzuki Roshi that she found it difficult to mix practice with the demands of being a householder. “I feel that I am trying to climb a ladder, but for every step upwards I slip back two steps” “Forget the ladder” Suzuki Roshi told her. “When you are awake everything is right here on the ground” He explained how the desire to gain anything means you miss the reality of the present. “When you realize the truth that everything changes, and find your composure in it, there you find yourself…” The goal is to let go of anything special and meet each moment with beginners mind.

Jack Kornfield, “Enlightenment” in Inquiring Mind

Sunday Quote: Nowhere to go, nothing to achieve

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If you cannot find the truth right where you are,

where else do you expect to find it?

Dogen

The not knowing which is somehow right

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Most western therapies are based on theories of personality; they are geared toward knowing, rather than not-knowing. An unspoken assumption in the therapeutic world is that we should always know who we are, and if we don’t that a real problem. So when an old maladaptive identity starts to break down, this may be frightening for client and therapist alike…. At times like this I rely on my own realization that none of us really knows who we are, that this is the nature of our being, that if we have a true self at all, it somehow lies in the heart of the unknowingness that opens up when we inquire deeply into our existence, and that we can hang out on the edge of this unknown, we may discover how to let ourselves be, without having to be something.

John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening

An underlying calm

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Meditation is not about trying to create something special, to get to a special state; meditation is more about uncovering what has always been and always is here. One is simply trying to bring external conditions into alignment with that fundamental reality of human nature.

Ajahn Amaro, Finding the Missing Peace

It becomes clear slowly

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I don’t know who God is exactly.
But I’ll tell you this.
I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a water splashed stone
and all afternoon I listened to the voices of the river talking….

And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me what they were saying.
Said the river I am part of holiness.
And I too, said the stone. And I too, whispered the moss beneath the water.

I’d been to the river before, a few times.
Don’t blame the river that nothing happened quickly.
You don’t hear such voices in an hour or a day.
You don’t hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.
And it’s difficult to hear anything anyway, through
all the traffic, the ambition.

Mary Oliver, At the River Clarion

We do not always see the way

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We must sense that we live in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.

 Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections