Month: October 2024

A repost, for the night that is in it.

We create big problems for ourselves by not recognizing mind energies when they arrive dressed up in stories. They are like the neighbor’s children disguised as Halloween ghosts. When we open the door and find the child next door dressed in a sheet, even though it looks like a ghost, we remember it is simply the child next door. And when I remember the dramas of my life are the energies of the mind dressed in the sheet of a story, I manage them more gracefully.

I think this is what people mean when they say, “We create our own reality.” I used to have trouble with that idea when I first heard it in the seventies. Hard as I try, I cannot create the reality of the sun rising tomorrow in the west, and I cannot create the reality of the people I know with illnesses being miraculously cured. But one reality I can create – the point of view I bring to any experience

Sylvia Boorstein, It’s Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness

When we see how compulsively thoughts repeat themselves, we begin to understand the psychological truth of samsara, the Sanskrit word for circular, repetitive existence. In Buddhist teaching, samsara most commonly refers to the wheel of life… Samsara also describes the unhealthy repetitions in our daily life. On a moment-to-moment level, we can see our samsaric thought patterns re-arise, in unconscious and limited ways. For example, we see how frequently our thoughts include fear, judgment, or grasping. Our thoughts try to justify our point of view. As an Indian saying points out: “He who cannot dance claims the floor is uneven.”

Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart

If any person cannot grasp this matter, 

let them just be still

and the matter will grasp them.

Henry Suso o.p. 1295–1366, German Dominican friar.