Month: April 2022

Deep down, already there

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Some traditions, East and West, hold that everyone, deep down, has an original perfect quality, a clear or luminous, natural, true state and potential. This gets covered over by the constructions and labels which we adopt as we conform to our environment, or as we change ourselves in response to people around us or the circumstances of our lives.

In some Buddhist traditions, we simply should get in touch with our already present, buddha-nature, underneath all our daily agitations. 

All beings are full with buddha-nature.

It is only due to their agitations that they do not know or perceive it.

Thus, diligently work with those experiences which lead you to eradicate getting agitated.


Mahaparinirvana Sutra, Mahayana Buddhist sutra, c 2nd Century CE

Sunday Quote: Dancing with life

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God ..[is].. more a verb than a noun, more a process than a conclusion, more an experience than a dogma, more a personal relationship than an idea.

There is Someone dancing with you now, and you are not afraid of making mistakes.

Richard Rohr

Darkness

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Darkness may hide the trees and the flowers from the eyes but it cannot hide love from the soul.

Rumi

In the face of loss

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It’s natural for us to fall apart in the face of loss. No need to stop it. Often our old coming mechanisms simply don’t work in this new context. However, finding our ground or recalling what has been most meaningful can help us stay present with what we are experiencing. We don’t have adequate language to describe this sort of incomprehensible experience, so we name it Mystery with a capital M.

Over the years, I have found that what we can experience or know directly may be much more important than our ability to explain or measure it.

Frank Ostaseski

Fast food

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Authentic God experience is always “too much”! It consoles our True Self only after it has devastated our false self.

We must begin to be honest about this instead of dishing out fast-food religion, which only wants consolation – and largely about non-essentials.

Richard Rohr, The Container and the Contents

Notions of happiness

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Your notions of happiness may be very dangerous. Happiness can only be possible in the here and now. Go back and examine deeply your notions and ideas of happiness. So let go of what you believed yesterday. Let go of what you thought last week you needed to be happy. The conditions of happiness that are in your life now are enough.

Thich Nhat Hanh