Every speck of dust has a marvellous soul, but to understand it, one must recover one’s religious and magical sense of things.
Joan Miró, Catalan painter
Even the smallest thing
Tag: Awareness
Reality passing by
We usually do not look into what is really there in front of us. We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we mistake those mental objects for reality. We get so caught up in this endless thought-stream that reality flows by unnoticed. We spend our time engrossed in activity, caught up in an eternal flight from pain and unpleasantness. We spend our energies trying to make ourselves feel better, trying to bury our fears. We are endlessly seeking security. Meanwhile, the world of real experience flows by untouched and untasted.
Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness In Plain English
As it is
The biggest error we make in our life … is to think that … our life just as it is, with all of its problems, … has something wrong with it. And because we think that, we get busy... Our life is always all right. … But since we refuse to accept life as it is, because of our preference for things that are pleasurable, we pick and choose from life.
Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen
Sunday Quote: Birth to oneself
A new moon teaches gradualness
and deliberation and how one gives birth
to oneself slowly. Patience with small details
makes perfect a large work, like the universe.
What nine months of attention does for an embryo
forty early mornings will do for your gradually growing wholeness
Rumi
Stopping
When we sit in meditation, we cease some of the restless moving of the mind, even if briefly. These periods of rest and ease switch off the grasping mind which always wants more. We stop, and realize that happiness is already available.
In the Buddha’s time there lived a killer called Angulimala… When Angulimala had one last victim to kill, he saw the Buddha coming down the road. Angulimala ran toward the Buddha with his sword, with the intent to kill his last victim and complete his task. The Buddha was walking slowly and it seemed Angulimala would have no difficulty in finishing him off, but the young man found that he could not catch up to the master, even though the Buddha appeared to not be moving at all. Angulimala finally called out to the Buddha in frustration, “Stop!”. The Buddha replied “Angulimala I have already stopped for the sake of all beings. It is you who has not stopped”
Angulimala was so moved that he abandoned his ways and became a monk…Soon he became an arhat, a liberated person, and entered nirvana.
Guo Gu, Silent Illumination
Not seeing
Lent begins today in the Christian tradition – a 40 day period of simplification in order to notice what is important.
There is a basket of fresh bread on your head, yet you go door to door asking for crusts. Knock on the inner door, no other.
Sloshing knee-deep in fresh riverwater,
yet you keep asking for other people’s waterbags.
Water is everywhere around you, but you see
only the barriers that keep you from water.
The horse is beneath the rider’s thighs,
and still you ask, “Where’s my horse?”
Right there, under you!
“Yes, this is a horse, but where’s the horse?”
Can’t you see it?
“Yes, I can see, but whoever saw such a horse?”
Mad with thirst, you can’t drink from the stream running close by your face. You are like a pearl on the deep bottom wondering inside the shell,
Where’s the ocean? Those mental questioning form the barrier. Stay bewildered inside God, and only that.
When you are with everyone but me, you’re with no one.
When you are with no one but me, you’re with everyone.
Instead of being so bound up with everyone, be everyone.
When you become that many, you’re nothing. Empty.
Rumi, in Coleman Barks, Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing
