To be indestructible

To believe means: To set free the indestructible in you, or more precisely: to be freed, or more precisely: to be indestructible, or more precisely, to be.

Croire signifie : libérer l’indestructible en soi, ou plus exactement : se libérer, ou plus exactement : être indestructible, ou plus exactement être.

Franz Kafka, 1883 –  1924, Journals

Really drinking tea

When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you’re not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You’re drinking your projects, you’re drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Sunday Quote: love

The first duty of love is to listen.

Paul Tillich, 1886 – 1965,  German-American philosopher and  theologian

Not identifying

From Ram Dass, who passed away just a few days ago

Now the whole idea of a meditative practice is the process of very simply extracting awareness from the identification with thought and sensation

Purpose

The post-Christmas sales are in full flow… A lot of the activity in the modern celebration of this season comes from the lack of an ability to rest in how we are or where we are, right now,  in our lives.  When there is a sense of “not enough”, there is a tendency to seek more or other,  through things or comparisons.

There is nothing accidental about the fact that we in the West are starved for some real sense of meaning and crying out for something that, in spite of all our apparent sophistication and material success, we are no longer even able to name. This western civilization of ours was created for a purpose. Until we start to discover that purpose again, our lives will be meaningless. Unless we touch our roots and make contact again with the essence of our past, we can have no future

Peter Kingsley. 1953 – Author, early Greek Philosophy scholar.

Quiet in heart

And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

Wendell Berry