We do not need to save ourselves from the world
only from ourselves and the stories we create.
May all beings be happy.
Michael Kewley, Former Buddhist monk, currently teaching courses on Awareness and meditation.
Creating drama
Tag: Awareness
Adult questions
A Zen saying helps us – “This being the case, how shall I proceed?”
That is so much more an adult question than “This being the case, who is at fault?” or “why is this happening to me?”
David Richo, The Five Things we Cannot Change
A flexible identity
In the most ordinary terms, egolessness is a flexible identity.
It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure who we are, or who anyone else is, either.
Pema Chodron
The uncreated
We frequently identify with the mental creations that have come together during our childhood to form our “personality”, but often these are fear-based and limiting.
The Buddha called the deepest dimension of the self, and the deepest dimension of reality, the “unborn” or the “uncreated.” In the Khuddaka Nikaya, the Buddha declared: “There is an unborn, unoriginated, uncreated, unformed…. Since there is an unborn, unoriginated, uncreated, and unformed, therefore there is an escape from the world of the born, originated, created and formed”.
Modern spiritual masters call that depth dimension the “ground of being.” In that ground, there is neither time nor space. Because there’s no time or space, there is no history. Because there is no history, there is only freedom….The Buddha was right. There is an escape from alienation, separation, and fear, and that escape is the awakening to the deepest dimension of our own self.
Andrew Cohen, The Only Place in the Universe
A daily practice
There is dying in the sense of letting this body go, letting go of feelings, emotions, these things we call our identity, and practicing to let those go.
The trouble is, we don’t let ourselves die day by day. Instead, we carry ideas about each other and ourselves. Sometimes it’s good, but sometimes it’s detrimental to our growth. We brand ourselves and imprison ourselves to an idea.
Letting go is a practice not only when you reach 90. It’s one of the highest practices. This can move you toward equanimity, a state of freedom, a form of peace.
Waking up each day as a rebirth, now that is a practice.
Brother Phap Dung, Plum Village senior disciple, Thich Nhat Hanh’s final mindfulness lesson: how to die peacefully
A larger brightness
On the Feast of All Saints
Strangely, all of life’s problems, dilemmas, and difficulties are not resolved not by negativity, attack, criticism, force, or logical resolution, but always by falling into a larger “brightness” – by falling into the good, the true, and the beautiful – by falling into God.
Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
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