We must slow down to a human tempo and we’ll begin to have time to listen. And as soon as we listen to what’s going on, things will begin to take shape by themselves. This is what the Zen people do. They give a great deal of time to doing whatever they need to do. That’s what we have to learn when it comes to meditation. We have to give it time . . . The best way to [do it] is: Stop.
Thomas Merton
The essence of our experience is change. Change is incessant. Moment by moment life flows by and it is never the same. Perpetual alteration is the essence of the perceptual universe. A thought springs up in your head and half a second later, it is gone. In comes another one, and that is gone too. A sound strikes your ears and then silence. Open your eyes and the world pours in, blink and it is gone. People come into your life and they leave again. Friends go, relatives die. Your fortunes go up and they go down. Sometimes you win and just as often you lose. It is incessant: change, change, change. No two moments ever the same.
There is not a thing wrong with this…It only sounds bleak when you view it from the level of ordinary mental perspective, the very level at which the treadmill mechanism operates. Down under that level lies another whole perspective, a completely different way to look at the universe. It is a level of functioning where the mind does not try to freeze time, where we do not grasp onto our experience as it flows by, where we do not try to block things out and ignore them.
Bhante Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English
Eventually, we all need to be willing to face the deepest, darkest beliefs we have about ourselves. Only in this way can we come to know that they are only beliefs, and not the truth about who we are. By entering into this process willingly, by seeing through the fiction of who we believe ourselves to be, we can connect with our true nature. As Nietzsche put it, ‘One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.’ Love is the dancing star, the fruit of saying yes, of consciously and willingly facing our fears.
Ezra Bayda, Awake in the World
We are so used to projecting our attention out into the world around us, it is a noticeable shift when we face inward and feel the subtle swaying of the head on the shoulders, along with all the muscular microcompensations keeping our body centered in gravity. The acrobat, like the meditator, is bringing conscious awareness to a process that is always occurring but is generally overlooked, which is a vital first step to learning anything valuable about ourselves.
Andrew Olendzki, Keep Your Balance
Silence is a very perilous part of life. It tells us what we are obsessing about. It reminds us of what we have not resolved within ourselves. It shows to us the underside of ourselves, from which there is no escape, which no amount of cosmetics can hide, that no amount of money or titles or power can possibly cure. Silence leaves us with only ourselves for company. Silence is, in other words, life’s greatest teacher.
Joan Chittister, Illuminated Life
To find equanimity and peace requires an acceptance of the mystery of life itself….When you can appreciate your life as part of the unfolding mystery of the immense forces that formed the entire universe, you can more easily accept the difficulties and hardships that you face. They are part of the unfolding of life. Many of the difficulties you’ve faced include endings, but none of them so far have been the end of your story. Without knowing the whole story, it is impossible to draw definite conclusions about our difficulties. We are still in the middle of them and don’t know how they will turn out. There is no rule book for life.
Jack Kornfield, A Lamp in the Darkness
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