Month: April 2021

An experience of emptiness

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Each chapter of the Bhagavad Gita concerns a particular yoga. This first chapter is called “the yoga of Arjuna’s despair” and it is significant that the experience of despair is a yoga; despair is often the first step on the path of spiritual life. It is very important to go through the experience of emptiness, of disillusion and despair. Many people do not awaken to the reality of God, and to the experience of transformation in their lives, until they reach the point of despair.

Bede Griffith, River of Compassion

One wave at a time

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True religious teaching is not a denial of our day-to-day predicaments; it is not cleverly glossing over reality, or feigning happiness. On the contrary, true religious teaching has to be able to show us how we can swim through one wave at a time— that is, those waves of laughter, tears, prosperity, or adversity.

Daitsu Tom Wright and Jisho Warner, Laughter Through the Tears: Kosho Uchiyama Roshi on Life as a Zen Beggar

A choice these days

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We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us
so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid,
or we can let them soften us, and make us kinder.


We always have the choice.

The Dalai Lama

Perspective

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Most things do not matter very much.

The rest do not matter at all.

Stylianos Ateshlis, (known as Daskalos), 1912–1995, Cypriot Christian mystic. 

Careful awareness

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To be born into any world is to be born into a place where these dangers are normal. They lie in wait right here in the body that at birth we laid claim to, and the world around us is full of triggers that can bring these dangers out into the open at any time.

It’s an often-overlooked feature of the Buddha’s teachings that he identified the basis for all our good and skillful qualities as heedfulness — not innate goodness or compassion: heedfulness. To recognize that there are dangers both within and without, that your actions can make the difference between suffering from those dangers and not, and that you’d better get your act together now: this is the heedfulness that makes us generous, wise, and kind.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, What Is True Safety?

How seductive, the thought of tomorrow

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So we have to be patient with ourselves. Over and over again we think we need to be somewhere else, and we must find the truth right here, right now; we must find our joy here, now.

How seductive it is, the thought of tomorrow. We must find our understanding here.

We must find it here; it is always here; this is where the grass is green.

John Tarrant, Calling on the name of Avalokiteshvara