Category: Be fully present

A seed

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Almost all cultures have the notion that there is a judgment when we die. Some kind of accounting has to be made of one’s life. I believe God — and to me “God” is just shorthand for the ineffable divine presence — has only one question for us at the end: “Did you become yourself?” We have a seeded self that begins to germinate at birth. Our true goal in life is to become that self.

There’s an African proverb: “When death finds you, may it find you alive.” Alive means living your own damn life, not the life that your parents wanted, or the life some cultural group or political party wanted, but the life that your own soul wants to live. That’s the way to evaluate whether you are an authentic person or not.

Michael Meade, Your Own Damn Life

 

Sunday Quote: Seasick

Karl Duffy2 Comments

If you don’t become the ocean,

you’ll be seasick every day

Leonard Cohen

Entrusting oneself to heaven

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When one has given up chasing after happiness…

Traveling through this world
I have entrusted myself to Heaven.
In my sack, three quarts of rice;
By the hearth, a bundle of firewood.

If someone asks what is the mark of enlightenment or illusion
I cannot say – wealth and honor are nothing but dust.
As the evening rain falls,  I sit in my hermitage. 
And stretch out both feet in answer

Ryoken, 1758–1831, Zen Buddhist monk and poet

Each moment is precious

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One day we’ll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn’t for our having.
So often, fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I’ll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.

 Li-Young Lee, To Hold (extract)

Turn towards the heart

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Open the window to the west, and disappear into the air inside you.

Near your breast bone there is an open flower.

Drink the honey that is around that flower.

Kabir

Preoccupied with expectation

Karl Duffy1 Comment

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is.

Alan Watts