Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think.
Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.
A. A. Milne, The House on Pooh Corner
Let us come alive to the splendour that is all around us
and see the beauty in ordinary things
Thomas Merton
photo Lewis Ronald
Dogen Zen-ji said, “To know yourself is to forget yourself.” We might think that knowing ourselves is a very ego-centered thing, but by beginning to look so clearly and so honestly at ourselves—at our emotions, at our thoughts, at who we really are — we begin to dissolve the walls that separate us from others. Somehow all of these walls, these ways of feeling separate from everything else and everyone else, are made up of opinions. They are made up of dogma; they are made of prejudice. These walls come from our fear of knowing parts of ourselves. There is a Tibetan teaching that is often translated as, “Self-cherishing is the root of all suffering.” It can be hard for a Western person to hear the term “self-cherishing” without misunderstanding what is being said. I would guess that 85% of us Westerners would interpret it as telling us that we shouldn’t care for ourselves….. But that isn’t what it really means. What it is talking about is fixating.
Pema Chodron, To Know Yourself is to Forget Yourself
photo U.S fish and wildlife service
The mind never stops looking for identity and this identity always defines itself through attributes: “the beautiful one”, “the smart one”, “the creative one”, “the successful one”… We are always searching for something to be.
Dzigar Kongtrul, Light Comes Through
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension,
which we feel as paralysis because
we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.
Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet
photo of the coffee shop in Kilcullen, called An Tearmann, which is Irish for “Refuge” or “Sanctuary”
At the center of his existence man is unknown to himself and must remain so,
for that part of being that calls itself man could be known fully
only if the community of being and its drama in time were finally known as a whole.
Eric Voegelin, American political philosopher, 1901 – 1985
photo bert kaufman
