Category: Be fully present

Dropping the filter

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Mount Lushan - fog.JPG

A similar idea to yesterday’s, this time from the Eastern traditions, to guide us as we “wander” through this day. What we think we know can sometimes get in the way, or close us down, to what is happening before us:

Jizo asked Hogen, “Where are you going?”

“I just wander aimlessly” replied Hogen.

“What is the nature of your wandering,” asked Jizo.

“I don’t know,” replied Hogen.

“Not knowing is the most intimate,” replied Jizo.

And at this Hogen experienced great enlightenment.

Zen Story

One Zen story states, “Not knowing is most intimate.” I understand this to mean that what is most essential is not understood through the filter of our judgments, past knowledge, or memories. When not-knowing helps these to drop away, the result can be a greater immediacy – what some might call being intimate. This practice of beginner’s mind is to cultivate an ability to meet life without preconceived ideas, interpretations, or judgments.

Gil Fronsdal

photo: Pfctdayelise

Not knowing

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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The great Meister Eckhart knew that life was much greater than what he could grasp or make sense of. He reminds us that holding a space for what we do not know is just as important as our ideas and concepts about what is happening. What do we really know about ourselves, our experience, our world?:

“I ask God to rid me of God,” Meister Eckhart says.

The God, who is known and familiar, is far too small for him.

Dorothee Sölle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

photo sayhey1111

Beyond our incessant thinking

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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In stopping,  looking and listening, in giving ourselves over to all our senses, including mind, we are in that moment embodying what we hold sacred in life. In such moments, we transcend who we think we are. We go beyond our stories and our incessant thinking, however deep and important it sometimes is. There, we reside in the seeing of what is here to be seen and the direct, non-conceptual knowing of what is here to be known, which we don’t have to seek because it is already and always here. We rest in awareness, in the knowing itself which includes not knowing as well.

Jon Kabat Zinn

photo 松岡明芳

Many directions

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

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When we live superficially, we are always outside ourselves, never quite ‘with’ ourselves, always divided and pulled in many directions –  we find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do, saying things we do not really mean, needing things we do not really need, exhausting ourselves for what we secretly realize to be worthless and without meaning in our lives. “Why spend your money on what is not food and your earnings on what fails to satisfy?” (Isaiah 55)

Thomas Merton, Love and Living

photo Highways agency

Sunday Quote: Can we just be?

Karl Duffy2 Comments

cow2Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something.

All your life you have been going after something, pursuing some goal.

Enlightenment is dropping all that.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Seeing through others eyes

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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We often find ourselves relating to people or to events through patterns inherited from our past and these prevent us from being fully open to the actual experience in front of us:

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand,

nor look through the eyes of the dead,

nor feed on the spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things  from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself