Seeds of wakefulness

Every time you’re willing to acknowledge your thoughts, let them go, and come back to the freshness of the present moment, you’re sowing seeds of wakefulness in your unconscious. After a while what comes up is a more wakeful, more open thought. You’re conditioning yourself toward openness rather than sleepiness. You might find yourself caught, but you can extricate yourself by how you use your mind, how you actually are willing to come back just to nowness, the immediacy of the moment. Every time you’re willing to do that, you’re sowing seeds for your own future, cultivating this innate fundamental wakefulness by aspiring to let go of the habitual way you proceed and to do something fresh.

Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness

Background radiation

While sitting in a large group of meditators, I bumped into another metaphor for dukkha — background radiation. As I sat I noticed a pervasive sense of feeling, feeling with an emotional coloring. Although subtle, it was clearly perceptible. It seemed to be a tinge of sadness, poignancy, or some such quality as that. It was radiating in the
background of my awareness. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and I wondered if that was dukkha? As long as there is a story of me there will be this background radiation. When it is no longer present, I suppose I’ll be enlightened, but I don’t expect this anytime soon!

This background radiation can be understood as a pervasive and unconscious feeling tone. Much of mental life (over 99%) occurs outside of conscious awareness, and this is true for feelings and emotions too. It seems as if this background radiation is a repository or a dumping ground for all the “selfing” that goes on throughout the day. All the aspects of what the Buddha called, “I, me, mine.” The things I want, the expectations I have that may not
be met or I fear may not be met. It all boils down to desire and what I do with it.

Arnie Kozak, Dukkha: The Buddha’s Metaphor for All That Ails You

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Delusions

 

 

All delusions begin in the mind.

All delusions are based on various ways we’re talking to ourselves and then believing what we are saying.

Adyashanti

The Myth of Urgency

There are never enough hours to satisfy the minions of wants. So close
your eyes and lean into the Oneness that asks nothing of you.

When the calls stack, answer to no one, though you receive them all.

Just open your beautiful hands, born with nothing in them.

You have never been more
complete than in this incomplete moment.

Mark Nepo, The Myth of Urgency

Sunday Quote: Actuality

Healing is coming to terms with the actuality of things.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Observations on “progress”

Taken from his lectures in 1935. If true then, even more so now:

We have said that the world is darkening.

The essential episodes of this darkening are:

The flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the standardization of man, the pre-eminence of the mediocre.

Martin Heidegger, German Philosopher, 1889 – 1976, An Introduction to Metaphysics