Tag: Awareness

Trust in your experience

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This is an exquisite truth:
Saints and ordinary folk are the same from the start.
Inquiring about a difference
is like asking to borrow string when you already have a good strong rope.

Every Dharma is known in the heart.

After rain, the mountain colors intensify.
Once you become familiar with the design of fate’s illusions
Your ink-well will contain all of life and death.

from the great Hsu Yun, 1840 – 1959, renowned Chan (Zen) Buddhist, regarded as the greatest Buddhist teacher in China in the modern era.

found in Grainger, The Longing In Between: Sacred Poetry From Around The World

Sunday Quote: Stay Here, now

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Too much longing:

it separates us

like scent from bread,

rust from iron.

Jane Hirshfield, Sentencings [extract]

It’s how you see

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Zen has an expression, “nothing special.” When you understand “nothing special,” you realize that everything is special. Everything’s special and nothing’s special. Everything’s spiritual and nothing’s spiritual.

It’s how you see, it’s what eyes you’re looking through, that matters.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Become love

Karl Duffy2 Comments

If you want to know God,
become love. If you want
to know others, become love.
If you want to know yourself,
become love. And if you want
to know love, forget all you
thought you knew or needed
to know, and become love.

Meister Eckhart, 1260 – c. 1328, German theologian, philosopher and mystic

Sunday Quote: Immersed

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Life is like music for its own sake.

We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.

Alan Watts

In every moment

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What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.

To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There is simply no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life.

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning