Enlightenment involves derailing and deconstructing the sense of lack. It is getting rid of that piece of psychology that in every moment says, ‘There’s something else that I should be having right now. There’s something else that I should be right now. There’s somewhere else that I could go right now. There’s somebody else who’s got it better than me right now. I’m not complete right now. I need to be something right now”.
Ajahn Sucitto, Parami: Ways to Cross Life’s Floods
photo sookie
One day you realized that what you wanted
had already happened long ago and in the dwelling place you had lived in before you began
and that every step along the way, you had carried
the heart and the mind and the promise
that first set you off and drew you on
and that you were more marvelous
in your simple wish to find a way, than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach: as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city
with golden towers, and cheering crowds,
and turning the corner at what you thought was the end of the road,
you found just a simple reflection.
David Whyte, Santiago from Pilgrim: Poems
As I mentioned yesterday, the old Celtic feast of Samhain, celebrated tomorrow, was seen as a liminal time, when the boundary between this world and the spiritual world was felt to be quite thin and it was easier to get glimpses of deeper meaning.
Anybody who goes through life with open mind and open heart will encounter moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words.
Roger Scruton, English philosopher
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity
George Eliot, Middlemarch
photo ray eye
In studying ourselves
We find the harmony
That is our total existence
We do not make harmony
We do not achieve it
Or gain it
It is there – all the time
Here we are – in the midst
Of this perfect way
And our practice is…
Simply to realize it
And then
To actualize it
In our everyday life…
Taizan Maezumi Roshi, 1931 – 1995
The basic root of happiness lies in our minds;
outer circumstances are nothing more than adverse or favourable
Matthieu Ricard
photo biswarup ganguley
Sit and be still
until in the time
of no rain you hear,
beneath the dry wind’s
commotion in the trees,
the sound of flowing
water among the rocks,
a stream unheard before,
and you are where
breathing is prayer
Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 2001
