Year: 2013

Becoming the observer

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Movie hobbies
The reason we often can’t see the true nature of things is thatwe’re involved with them too subjectively and are afraid of whatthey might reveal about our egos. But if we step back from these phenomena, they become not so much ‘my story’ as just ‘a story’. It’s similar to watching a movie that’s extremely enjoyable – when it ends you can say, ‘Well, that’s not my story. That’s not me.’ You may have been taken through all kinds of impassioned human emotions (if the film is really good), but then you can go peacefully back to your own ordinary life.
Ajahn Thiradhammo, Contemplations on the Seven Factors of Awakening

Beyond duality

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File:Downy Birch, Priory Park - geograph.org.uk - 1291964.jpg

In our actual experience of life, our life is not plural, not only plural, but also singular. Each one of us are independent and dependent. We…after some years we will die. That will be the end of our life but if we think that is our end of life, that is wrong understanding.  And if we think we do  not die, that is also wrong understanding: we die and we do not die and that is right understanding.

Suzuki Roshi, Lecture on posture

photo Ian Capper

Sunday Quote: Control and non-control

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File:Trodden Flower.jpg

A flower falls, even though we love it;

a weed grows, even though we do not love it.

Dogen

photo:  pixie from he

Conditions for Growth

Karl Duffy1 Comment
gentle
The potential space between baby and mother, between child and family, between the individual and society and the world, depends on experience which leads to trust.  It can be looked upon as sacred to the individual, in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living.
Winnicott, Playing and Reality

Releasing fixed identities

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Loving another person

Being kind is a simple practice, but it is also a transforming practice,

because as we continue, the conceptual boundary between “us” and “them” begins to melt

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

On a journey

Karl Duffy2 Comments

South Uist beach. Scotland.

Everyone should be born into this world happy and loving everything. But in truth it rarely works that way. For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it. Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes almost forgetting how wondrous the world is and how miraculously kind some people can be? And have you too decided that probably nothing important is ever easy? Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more, and some days I feel I have wings.

Mary Oliver, Halleluiah.