Tag: Awareness

Incarnate

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Even the most transcendent visions of spirituality must shine through the here and now and be brought to life in how we walk, eat, and love one another. This is not easy. The power of our fear, the habits of judgment within us, repeatedly prevent our touching the sacred. Often we will unconsciously draw our spirituality back to the polarity of good and bad, sacred and profane. Where is liberation to be found? The Buddha taught that both human suffering and human enlightenment are found in our own fathom-long body with its senses and mind. If not here and now, where else will we find it?

Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart

We think we know

Karl Duffy2 Comments

However great our conceptual knowledge and understanding might be,

in the face of real experience,

concepts are like flakes of snow fallen on a burning fire.

Zenkei Shibayama, 1894 – 1974, Japanese Rinzai Zen priest, head Roshi of Nanzenji Zen Monastery in Kyoto

Our true nature

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The winter solstice, in the northern hemisphere: the shortest, darkest day of the year

In dark times  when we feel even more burdened and insecure, we should be contemplating our true nature more than ever. It can cheer us up on any day. Despite all the ups and downs of our life, we are fundamentally awake individuals who have a natural ability to become compassionate and wise. Our nature is to be cheerful. This cheerfulness is deeper than temporary conditions. The day does not have to be sunny for us to be cheerful. We are free of having to depend on something else to make us happy. We can bask freely in the natural radiance of our mind.  This is the equanimity of true cheerfulness — nothing more, nothing less.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, A Simple Sense of Delight

Dark and bright

Karl Duffy1 Comment

We are the driven ones.
But the pressing on of time,
Takes us as small things
Into the everlasting.

All this rushing
Will soon be over;
For it is in lingering
That we receive insight.

All is in repose:
the darkness and the brightness,
the flower and the book.

Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus First Part, 22

Bareness of being

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

So often we run from feeling and yet it is only through feeling that we can know the depth of life. Only through feeling can we hold the smallest shell or bone and feel the tug of the Universe. Such raw being aches, for, as the Buddhists say, the bareness of being here is so full. …With no way to that bareness but through feeling and the listening that feeling opens….. Through this bareness of being, we refresh our openness and enliven our innate connection to the one living sense. Through our unblocked, sincere response to life, we can tune our inner person with the great mysteries.

Mark Nepo

Lacking

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Craving leads to suffering whenever we fail to see that what we crave won’t really provide us with the kind of lasting satisfaction or happiness that we are seeking. The nature of craving is not to be satisfied. It is about lack. When we get stuck in this place of lacking something that we believe will bring us happiness, then we can really suffer.

Walt Opie