Tag: Awareness

Beyond the mind

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We in the West think that the mind is everything, but all Eastern practice is to get beyond the mind to the point of the silent witness, where you’re witnessing yourself, where you’ve gone beyond the ego, beyond the self. The Indian tradition rests on what the West has largely lost: that there are three levels. There is the level of the body and the level of the mind, which the Western world thinks is the end. But beyond the body is the spirit. It’s the Atman, the pneuma of St. Paul, another dimension where we go beyond the mind, the senses, and the feelings, and we’re aware of the transcendent reality. And that is the goal of life, to get to that

Bede Griffiths, 1906 – 1993, Catholic Benedictine/ Camaldolese monk who lived in the ashrams of South India.

The wisest choice

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If you must look back, do so forgivingly.

If you will look forward, do so prayerfully.

But the wisest course would be to be present

in the present gratefully.

Maya Angelou

Pack nothing

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Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have.

I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.

Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.
 

Mary Oliver, Thirst

Sunday Quote: new and unique

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Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe

— a moment that never was before and never will be again.


Pablo Casals quoted in Diane Loomans, Full Esteem Ahead

Now the dancing begins

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The mind is constantly trying to figure out
what page it’s on in the story of itself.


Close the book. Burn the bookmark. End of story.


Now the dancing begins.

Ikko Narasaki Roshi, Zen Buddhist monk, died 1996.

Leaving behind

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Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said..
A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made..
Or a garden planted….
It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as
you change something from the way it was before you touched it
into something that’s like you
after you take your hands away..
The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said..
The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all….the gardener will be there a lifetime.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451