Another month ends. Our rituals and practices, like sitting in meditation, are like a well-worn path which allow us to deepen our capacity to see
To learn something new,
take the path that you took yesterday.
John Burroughs, 1837-1921, American naturalist, quoted in Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells
Ester asked why people are sad.
“That’s simple,” says the old man. “They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people’s ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.”
Paulo Coehlo, The Zahir
Everybody is nothing until you love them
Tennessee Williams, The Rose Tattoo
When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking,
you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking.
When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice – the thinker – but the one who is aware of it.
Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom.
Eckhart Tolle, Silence Speaks
In a dream I am walking joyfully up the mountain. Something breaks and falls away, and all is light. Nothing has changed, yet all is amazing, luminescent, free. Released at last, I rise into the sky … This dream comes often. Sometimes I run, then lift up like a kite, high above earth, and always I sail transcendent for a time before awaking. I choose to awake, for fear of falling, yet such dreams tell me that I am a part of things, if only I would let go, and keep on going.
“Do not be heavy,” Soen Roshi says. “Be light, light, light – full of light!”
Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
Soen Roshi was a Taiwanese-born, Zen Buddhist master in the Rinzai tradition.
When Bodhidharma was asked, “What is the first principle of the holy teaching”, he didn’t say suffering. He said, “Vast emptiness. Nothing holy.” This is what the Heart Sutra says, too. The Heart Sutra says, “Things are founded on emptiness.”
This means really that things don’t truly have a cause. Things have a virtue in themselves beyond anything we can say that causes them. So you have a virtue in yourself beyond anything that brought it about. Any suffering that arises in you because of your history, any gifts you have because of your history, these are strong things, yet they are also just a pure appearance of Buddha nature. Even your suffering and also your joy. I think in some sense we can’t take credit for either. We just have to learn to love our lives so deeply that we welcome whatever comes.
John Tarrant, Poison and Joy
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