Month: January 2023

Activity Mind

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The essence of meditation is training in mindfulness. This is done by resting the attention on an external meditation support, and returning to it every time it drifts away into thought. This action is possible because one part of the mind observes and identifies with thoughts and feelings as they arise. If we did not have this capacity for self-reflective awareness we would not know or realize we were thinking when thinking happens. We call the part of the mind that observes “observer consciousness” and the part that thinks and gets observed as “activity mind”

Rob Nairn, Diamond Mind: A Psychology of Meditation

Directly knowing

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Direct knowing is one of the main purposes of meditation practice, dropping the filtering caused by busyness and distraction, regret and resentment, ideal worlds and future wishes

If you use your mind to study reality, you won’t understand either your mind or reality.

If you study reality without using your mind, you’ll understand both.

from the legendary, larger than life, Bodhidharma, 5th or 6th C, AD.

Beyond the mind

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We in the West think that the mind is everything, but all Eastern practice is to get beyond the mind to the point of the silent witness, where you’re witnessing yourself, where you’ve gone beyond the ego, beyond the self. The Indian tradition rests on what the West has largely lost: that there are three levels. There is the level of the body and the level of the mind, which the Western world thinks is the end. But beyond the body is the spirit. It’s the Atman, the pneuma of St. Paul, another dimension where we go beyond the mind, the senses, and the feelings, and we’re aware of the transcendent reality. And that is the goal of life, to get to that

Bede Griffiths, 1906 – 1993, Catholic Benedictine/ Camaldolese monk who lived in the ashrams of South India.

The starting place

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You are looking everywhere except within you,

and that is the only place where you are going to find the treasure,

the truth,

the beauty.

Osho

What wishes to grow?

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Whatever wishes to grow within you —a curiosity, a talent, an interest —

is life seeking its expression through you. Our old desire for comfort, even happiness,

may prove an impediment. We are here a very short time.

Let us make it as luminous and as meaningful as we can.

Time to stop being afraid, and time to show up as yourself.

James Hollis, Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey

Sunday Quote: Every ending is a beginning

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We arrive and we start again

Hazak, Hazak, Venithazzek [חֲזַק חֲזַק וְנִתְחַזֵּק ]

Be strong,

be strong,

Let us be strengthened

[or Let us strengthen one another]

The words traditionally chanted at the end of the reading of the books of the Torah