Two quotes from Mazu, 709–88, one of the greatest of the ancient Chinese Chan (Zen) masters, to remind us to live in the immediacy of the present moment and not in how our thoughts tell us what our life should be like:
When successive thoughts do not await one another,
and each thought dies peacefully away,
this is called absorption in the oceanic reflection.
A monk asked, “What is the essential meaning of Buddhism?”
Mazu said, “What is the meaning of this moment?”
Christmas and New Year can give rise to a lot of “I am” or “I am not” thoughts…
We tend to just react and take it for granted that all the ‘I am’ and ‘I am not’ is the truth. We create ourselves as a personality and attach to our memories. We remember the things we learned, we remember what we’ve done – generally the more extreme things; we tend to forget more ordinary things. In meditation we are bringing awareness to the conditions of the mind here and now, just by being aware of this sense of ‘I am, I am not’. The thought ‘I am’ is an impermanent condition. The thought ‘I am not’ is an impermanent condition.
Ajahn Sumedho, Investigating the Mind
Sitting in meditation is a way of clarifying the ground of experience and resting at ease in your Actual Nature.
It is called “ Revealing the Original Face” and “Bringing to light the landscape of the basic ground.”
Put aside all concerns. Let go of all the things that hook you.
Simply, do nothing at all.
Don’t create things with the six senses.
Clear water has no back or front, space has no inside or outside.
Objects of mind and the mind itself have no place to exist.
Zazen Yojinki, one of the two founders of Sōtō Zen in Japan, late-13th/early-14th century AD, Notes on what to be aware of in Zazen
The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the self nor of the other: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.
David Whyte
Beannachtaí na Nollaig oraibh go léir
(Christmas blessings from Ireland to all of you who drop by or who read each day)
It’s odd in a way, this business of Perfect Christmasses. The story of the first Christmas is the story of a series of completely unplanned, messy events – a surprise pregnancy, an unexpected journey that’s got to be made, a complete muddle over the hotel accommodation when you get there… Not exactly a perfect holiday.
But it tells us something really vital. We try to plan all this stuff and stay in charge, and too often (especially with advertisers singing in our ears the whole time) we think that unless we can cook the perfect dinner, plan the perfect wedding, organise the perfect Christmas, we somehow don’t really count or we can’t hold our heads up.
But in the complete mess of the first Christmas, God says, ‘Don’t worry – I’m not going to wait until you’ve got everything sorted out perfectly before I get involved with you. I’m already there for you in the middle of it all, and if you just let yourself lean on me a bit instead of trying to make yourself and everything around you perfect by your own efforts, everyone will feel a little more of my love flowing’.
Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, Pause for Thought, BBC Radio 2.
The days begin to lengthen, and we look forward….
Our biggest shadow issue is not evil. It’s that we live small and adaptive lives. And Jung put it this way in a very homey metaphor. He said, we all walk in shoes too small for us. And I think that way of saying, all right, we had to learn early as children, the world’s big, and we’re not. The world’s powerful and we’re not, now, how are you going to survive a few decades with that?
And so the, the biggest shadow issue for us is how much fear governs our behaviors,…And how often we’re serving the sort of archaic messages from long ago and far away, which is walking down the street backwards. And, how seldom we step into the largeness of our own journey, because frankly it’s intimidating.
James Hollis
Mindfulbalance 