Category: Be fully present

Moments when we see

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Sometimes, admittedly,  the world can still of a sudden assume a resonance beyond

the one-dimensional, as the sun sometimes breaks through the Irish summer’s ample blanket of cloud cover.

And sometimes even in the rain there comes a moment when

the bird on the neighbouring roof  is an ancient symbol or a hieroglyph

in the book of the riddle’s meaning.

And this is poetry, when the bird preaches to you, and you respond

By preaching strictly for the birds.

Ciaran O’Donnell, A Former Franciscan visits Assisi

Noticing, right now, this morning

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Normally,  fantasies are spinning out , one after another, usually about being someplace else or being different from what we are right now. What about a moment of stopping  and checking whether this is going on right now?  Simply waking up this moment to what is taking place right now, opening up to……nothing special. Just wind blowing, windows rattling, birds calling, breath flowing in and out, bright sunlight flowing through the shades making patterns on the floor. When that happens it is clear that no wishing has brought it about! Being here and now in unadorned simplicity is our true state – whole and inseparable from anything else.

Toni Parker, The Silent Question

Sunday Quote: A still mind, not fixing….

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God, rest in my heart,

Fortify me

Take away my hunger for answers.

Mary Oliver

Discovering the world anew

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Some more words from Jacques Lusseyran, who as I said in an earlier post, was blinded in an accident at age eight. He writes about the way this allowed him to develop his capacity for paying attention which goes far beyond just the ability to see and think :

[Those who can see] commit a strange error. They believe that we know the world only through our eyes. For my part, I discovered that the universe consists of pressure, that every object and every living being reveals itself to us at first by a kind of quiet yet unmistakable pressure that indicates its intention and its form. I even experienced the following wonderful fact: A voice, the voice of a person, permits him to appear in a picture. When the voice of a man reaches me, I immediately perceive his figure, his rhythm, and most of his intentions. Even stones are capable of weighing on us from a distance. So are the outlines of distant mountains, and the sudden depression of a lake at the bottom of a valley.

This correspondence is so exact that when I walked arm in arm with a friend along the paths of the Alps, I knew the landscape and could sometimes describe it with surprising clarity. Sometimes; yes, only sometimes. I could do it when I summoned all my attention. Permit me to say without reservation that if all people were attentive, if they would undertake to be attentive every moment of their lives, they would discover the world anew. They would suddenly see that the world is entirely different from what they had believed it to be.

Just the seen

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

You should train yourself like this:

Whenever you see a form, simply see; whenever you hear a sound, simply hear;

Whenever you smell an aroma, simply smell; whenever you taste a flavour, simply taste;

Whenever you feel a sensation, simply feel; whenever a thought arises, let it just be a thought.

The Buddha, Sutta on Bahiya

Not chasing after happiness

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Some more reflections on not going anywhere, from a lovely recent book by Thomas Bien, entitled The Buddha’s Way of Happiness. Letting go of our instinctive need to “fix” ourselves – of the drive to do more and more –  is the key to change.  Staying put is a secret to getting places.

We get stuck in the drama of our lives. If we are to find happiness we instinctively feel that we have to go through something, endure some difficulty, go on a quest, slay dragons or monsters and ultimately find the gold or the princess in order to find the resolution and the peace which we seek. When we are told that happiness is available right now, we can hardly escape thinking what we have to do, endure and struggle to find it. We almost can’t help it.

Seeing life as “story” gets us caught in the notion that we don’t have happiness. We have to go after happiness somehow.…When we learn that we can be happy right now, just breathing in and out, and seeing a leaf for the miracle it actually is, instead of the idea of “leaf”, we’re almost disappointed. We want it to be a great achievement. If we can’t find a way to see it as an achievement, then we can’t feel special and feed the ego. Instead, in seeing things as they actually are, we step outside the ego.