Years ago I had a Buddhist teacher in Thailand who would remind all his students that there was always something to be thankful for. He’d say, “Let’s rise and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we may have learned a little. And if we didn’t learn even a little, at least we didn’t get sick. And if we did get sick, at least we didn’t die. So let us all be thankful”.
Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love: Reflections on Loving.
If we have to walk across rough and thorny ground, one way of protecting our feet is to cover the whole ground with leather, but this is not very practical. We can achieve the same result in a much simpler way—by covering our feet. Similarly, if we wish to protect ourself from suffering we can either try to change the whole world to make it conform to our wishes, or we can change our mind. Until now we have been trying to change the world, but this clearly has not worked. Now we need to change our mind.
Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Eight Steps to Happiness
There are days when I am convinced that Heaven starts already, now, in this ordinary life, just as it is, in all its incompleteness, yet, this is where Heaven starts. See within yourself, if you can find it.
I walked through the field in front of the house, lots of swallows flying, everywhere! Some very near me. It was magical.
We are already one, yet we know it not
Thomas Merton
Our whole life can pass us by as we wait for something to happen…
You don’t go to heaven, you become heaven.
You don’t go to hell, you become hell.
And it’s happening now.
Richard Rohr
Now every mortal has pain
and sweat is constant.
But if there is anything dearer than being alive,
it’s dark to me.
Euripides, Hippolytus, 428 BC
As long as the mind is comparing, there is no love, and the mind is always judging, comparing, weighing, looking to find where the weakness is. So where there is comparison, there is no love. When the mother and father love their children, they do not compare them, they do not compare their child with another child; it is their child and they love their child. But you want to compare yourself with something better, with something nobler, with something richer, so you create in yourself a lack of love. You are always concerned with yourself in relationship to somebody else. As the mind becomes more and more comparative, more and more possessive, more and more depending, it creates a pattern in which it gets caught, so it cannot look at anything anew, afresh.
And so it destroys that very thing, that very perfume of life, which is love.
J. Krishnamurti
