When you forget about the good and the non-good, the worldly life and the spiritual life, and all other ideas from teachings, and permit no thoughts relating to them to arise, and you abandon body and mind — then there is complete freedom. When the mind is like wood or stone, there is nothing to be discriminated.
Pai-chang Huai-hai, Chinese Zen Master 720 – 814
photo pieter lanser
To be nobody-but-yourself
— in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else —
means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
e.e. cummings, A Poet’s Advice
photo rennett stowe
How Han-shan Te-Ching (1546 – 1623) came to understand to stay fully present in the moment, not in a perpetual movement of becoming:
When Hanshan got up from his seat and walked around, he did not see things in motion. When he opened the window blind, suddenly a wind blew the trees in the yard, and the leaves flew all over the sky. However, he did not see any signs of motion. He understood what the text spoke of as, “Streams and rivers run into the ocean and yet there is no flowing.”
The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey
is the step that you are taking at this moment.
That’s all there ever is.
Eckhart Tolle
photo japanese gardens kildare, peter clarke
You can be still and still moving
Content even in your discontent
Ram Dass
photo itzafineday
“Is my life meaningful?” When I ask the question this way the perspective is very different. Now my happiness will no longer depend upon my never getting sick, or upon my not getting lonely, or upon my never being misunderstood, or upon my never making wrong choices, or on somehow being exempt from death’s shadow. Life can be frustrating and still be very meaningful. We can be lonely, sick, sorrowful about wrong choices, over-worked and unappreciated, staring old age and death in the face and still experience deep meaning. Happiness will be a by-product of that.
Are my symbols working? Does my life have a meaning?
The question about happiness comes after that question.
Ron Rolheiser, Happiness and Meaning
