Year: 2013

Sweeping out clutter

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

path

But it’s not so simple, this sort of “quiet hour” : it has to be learnt. A lot of unimportant inner litter and bits and pieces have to be swept out first. Even a small head can be piled high inside with irrelevant distractions. True, there may be edifying emotions and thoughts, too, but the clutter is ever-present. So let this be the aim of the meditation: to turn ones innermost being into a vast empty plain, with none of that treacherous undergrowth to impede the view so that something of “God” can enter you, and something of “Love” too.

Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life

Sunday Quote: Colour

Karl Duffy1 Comment

ladybird 130413

There is not one little blade of grass,

there is no colour in this world

that is not intended to make men rejoice.

John Calvin

Balance, rooted in the body

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Zwei Stare.JPG

Healing is a natural  result of finding true balance.

If we relate to a balanced ease in the body, it brings us into the balance of our minds, and it is only from that basis that we can get a feel, through the tangle of anxieties and mood swings, of a simple thread of emotional ease and psychological space. It’s a shift from being tense or on guard, to something more trusting. And it’s through attending to this that we can step back from the biases and old narratives.

Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma

An unobserved life

Karl Duffy3 Comments

cowslips

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

Eric Hoffer, American moral and social philosopher.

Just simply being fully present

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Dishes to wash LGC.jpg

While  washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes.  At first glance, that might seem a little silly: why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that’s precisely the point. the fact that I am standing there and washing the dishes is a wondrous reality. I’m being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There’s no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.

Thich Nhat Hanh

photo: Ataraxes

Seeing the mind as organizing

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:LEGO-02.jpg

The brain freezes the world into discrete mind moments, each capturing a barely adequate morsel of information, then processes these one by one in a rapid linear sequence. The result is a compiled virtual world of experience, more or less patterned on what’s `out there,’ but mostly organized around the needs and limitations of the apparatus constructing it. It is like the brain and its senses are hastily taking a series of snapshots, then stringing them together into a movie we call `the stream of consciousness.’

Andrew Olenszki, Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism