Seven offerings that cost nothing . . .
A compassionate eye, a smiling face, loving words, a warm heart, physical service, a seat, and lodging.
The Buddha
Costs nothing today
Tag: Awareness
The end of negative patterns
One of our frequent chants includes this phrase: May this holy life lead us to the end of this whole mass of suffering.
Essentially, we’re looking at a way of life, of living. It’s not a particular detail but the whole thing. Of course, we can have special sessions, retreats or occasions within that, but they’re all part of the bigger picture. The big picture is one of purifying kamma, and ending kamma. This means that through our actions and intentions, we purify from delusion, hatred, greed, fear, jealously, mistrust, avarice, ambitions, the whole lot of obsessiveness. It is through this that the mind can be level, open, and realize. Realization can occur; deathlessness. The beauty of this is the very web of training – the forms and instructions we use in order to open and let go – cover our entire way of living.
Ajahn Sucitto
Let go
The sun will set without your assistance
Talmud quote found in H. Polano The Talmud: Selections
Caught in the middle
“No-thought” does not mean cutting off thinking – it means there is no fixation with regard to the free flow of our thinking. We don’t need to reify or solidify what we experience into my thoughts, my feelings. If self-grasping is present, then thoughts don’t flow. When we suffer, we are caught in the middle of the stories that we’re fabricating, and, in this way, we prolong our suffering.
Guo Gu, Silent Illumination
Schedules
A Bank Holiday here in Ireland; a non-working day and so a different way in which we relate to time:
So many times I have been unable to listen or to notice what someone was going through or where they were headed because it didn’t meet with my schedule. Patience and timing are inextricably linked. Patience, which we can regard with such excruciation, offers a hidden reward. When we stop watching the pot, we may learn that it boils right on time.
Sometimes my father would forget to wind the big clock, the weights would fall, and time would stop.
We wind the clock. It does not have to wind us.
Barry Boyce, What Time is Now?
Seasons
The first of May marks the start of Summer in the old Celtic way of dividing the seasons
The heart’s seasons seldom coincide with the calendar. Who among us has not been made desolate beyond all words upon some golden day when the little creatures of the air and meadow were life incarnate, from sheer joy of living? Who among us has not come home, singing, when the streets were almost impassable with snow, or met a friend with a happy, smiling face, in the midst of a pouring rain?
The soul, too, has its own hours of Winter and Spring.
Myrtle Reed 1874 – 1911, American author, poet, journalist, and philanthropist.
