Our endless and impossible journey towards home
is in fact our home
David Foster Wallace, American Writer 1962 – 2008
Gates
When we wake up in the morning, right away we turn on the computer and check our email or read the news on our phone… We live in a world of constant information, available any time and anywhere. But in such a world, we have all the more reason to maintain proper on and off switches.
This is why distinctions are so important. Try erecting gates in your mind
For example, the threshold of your home constitutes the first gate. When you leave home and cross this first gate, thoughts of work of work start to form in your head. The door of your car or the train is the second gate; once you cross it you start planning out your work day. And finally, when you arrive at your office and cross the third gate, you are ready to focus on your work
When the work day is over and you arrive back at the first gate, it’s important to leave work behind.
Shunmyo Masuno, Zen The Art of Simple Living
Keep knocking
Commit yourself to a daily practice
your loyalty to that is like a ring at the door
Keep knocking and eventually the joy that lives inside
will look out to see who is there
Rumi
Contain all colours
[There is] a phrase in the Book of Equanimity: “A woven brocade contains all colors”
Birth, old age, illness and death, as well as happiness and misfortune, gain and loss, love and hate – all of these are important tools for weaving the brocade of human life. A brocade cannot be woven with the single color of happiness. Given time, place and occasion, everything “contains all colors”. It is in this way that the Pure Land, the Other Shore, is made manifest.
Shundo Aoyama, Zen Seeds
Letting sorrow drop
As water falls from a lotus leaf
so sorrow drops from those
who are free of toxic craving
Dhammapada 336
The sorrows of life can convince us they are really important. They seem to demand a huge amount of attention. However…if mindfulness practice is mature, we will be able to observe suffering when it arises without becoming too fascinated by it. We will be able to reflect wisely on the reality of the moods we have, not just be sensitive to them. They are not ultimate – they come and go.
Commentary by Ajahn Munindo
Relating to challenges
Unless we live all our lives in the torment of the contradictions, as C.G. Jung insists, then we’re not human. We can’t become whole. If you’re stuck, and you don’t know what to do, stuck between two opposites, and you allow them each to live within you, then a small transformation of the ego takes place. It becomes related to the Self instead of identifying with it.
Helen Luke, 1904 – 1995, Jungian Analyst and writer
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